Bangkok Post : A CLASS ACT ON A BUILDING SITE

Those who buy houses and condominiums seldom think about the construction workers who do backbreaking work to build these homes - and their children who usually go without any schooling.

These labourers mostly come down from northern Thailand or are undocumented workers from Cambodia, Laos and Burma. Often neither the parents nor the children have access to education or health care. If both parents work at the construction site the children have to accompany them to these dangerous areas because they lack day care facilities.

Some of these children have been fortunate enough to get help from Graeme Bristol, a Canadian-registered architect who has been lecturing at the School of Architecture and Design at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) since 1998. He founded the Center for Architecture and Human Rights (CAHR) as a national non-profit organisation in Canada in 2006 and is now in the process of registering CAHR Thailand.

Also helping Mr Bristol with this meaningful work are Father Joe Maier's Mercy Centre and the Lighthouse Club. The latter is an organisation started in the UK about 50 years ago for people in the construction industry. Initially they raised money to help the widows of deceased construction workers, but Father Joe talked them into expanding their role and helping educate the workers' children.

Mr Bristol's attention was drawn to the plight of these disadvantaged children when a friend who was an engineer at the construction site of Suvarnabhumi airport mentioned that they were building a camp for 20,000 workers at the site.

"I said: 'That is a city, a whole city. Show me the design. I would be very interested to know how you put together a city for 20,000 people that is temporary.'

"And he showed me this design and it looked like a sort of design that an engineer might do - everything on a grid and so on.

"And I said: 'Well what about the school? I don't see one here.' He said: 'Why would you want a school?' I said: 'Well you have kids here.'

"He said: 'Well, yeah, but don't they get schooling somewhere?' I said: 'I don't know where."'

At this point the Mercy Centre and the Lighthouse stepped up to resolve the issue by building a school at the airport construction site for the workers' children, estimated at more than 2,000.

However, two to three years later when the construction of the airport had progressed substantially, the school had to be torn down.

"I kept asking: 'What did you do with the school? Where is it?' Nobody knows.

"It was very well built, all out of wood. It was a nice little building and it just disappeared. Basically they just tore it down. Such a waste."

This started Mr Bristol thinking that surely such a school could be made in a way that it could be disassembled and moved to wherever it was needed.

In 2006 he was able to get the Builders and Woodworkers' International (BWI) interested in his idea to build portable schools for construction workers' children. The representatives of this organisation came to Thailand in March 2008 and also saw the need for the schools and offered funds to make them a reality.

Mr Bristol then moved quickly on the idea by holding a design studio with a group of students at KMUTT.

"At the end of the process, which was September last year, we had a schematic design in place," he said. The next step called for building the school at KMUTT, starting in November 2008, and then moving it.

"So I held another studio, which I called the construction studio, and unfortunately there wasn't a lot of interest in actual hands-on stuff."

Because these architecture students prefer working on paper rather than doing physical labour, the project moved a little slowly. Mr Bristol's return to Canada for a month earlier this year caused another delay.

The big day finally came last May when the building was moved and reconstructed at a construction site in Soi Mangkorn-Kandhe off Theparak Road, about 13 kilometres southwest of Suvarnabhumi airport. Soon after that there was an opening ceremony attended by people from the Mercy Centre and the Lighthouse, as well as diplomats from the Canadian embassy.

Overall the project has been a huge success, but Mr Bristol still has work to do. This first school is not entirely portable since the traditional construction method required that there be red bricks running all the way around the base. Some of the elements are portable, however, chiefly the walls and the columns.

Mr Bristol suspects that if he tried to move the school, which is soon to be expanded to include a clinic, the surrounding community would oppose it because it has become a part of their lives. He also reasons that when children from the construction camp eventually move on their places are taken up by other poor children in the neighbourhood.

Mr Bristol has now moved on to the next step, which is to make the facilities truly portable. He is now going back to his original idea of making the school out of shipping containers, which could be portable if fashioned into a trailer.

"If you put it on wheels and make it a trailer it's going to be a lot quicker response in terms of getting into a community. It moves in a day, very quick. So this semester my students are working on that as a project."

While this would work beautifully, he does realise that it is a bit expensive. For that reason he plans to approach a Canadian organisation called the Council of Forest Industries (COFI) to donate softwood lumber for a wood-frame variation of the school. This organisation would benefit from gaining a foothold in the Southeast Asian market, which is difficult for it to enter because this type of lumber does not do well in a tropical climate unless it has been treated.

A school built of softwood lumber would show that it does work very well here after treatment.

"COFI and other related organisations have been trying to get into Japan for 30 years.

"They have had some moderate success there, but I don't think they have had a great deal of success in Southeast Asia."