Last Updated: 11:36am, May 23, 2014
THE wise words once uttered by the legendary Helen Keller go: "Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much."
Separated by over a century later and in a different continent, a team of young Malaysian visionaries have taken Keller's quote to heart and have started inspiring others to do the same.
Enter Epic Collaborative CEO John-Son Oei who set up EPIC Homes with a handful of his like-minded friends whom were distraught by the plight of the largely forgotten indigenous people, or Orang Asli, of Peninsular Malaysia.
They visited Orang Asli villages and were dumbfounded by the condition of the homes in which many of them lived in - dilapidated, crumbling structures that no amount of paint could save.
That's when the idea hatched in their minds: let's build homes for these people to reach out to the community and create relationships between city and rural folk.
EPIC does not randomly drop by any community in need and build homes for them; instead, they build homes with the villagers. In essence, it's a team effort - dozens of volunteers working together with the local Orang Asli to do something that engineers, architects and contractors never thought possible: to build a house within three days.
"It all fell into place when I spoke to the father of a friend of mine who happened to be a developer.
"I told him about our idea to build a simple, basic house within three days, and he thought it was very interesting. So, he called in his architects and engineers into a meeting and told them to try and create a home that could be built within three days, and also be as simple as building IKEA furniture or Lego," explained Oei.
What resulted from that meeting, and thousands of hours spent revising and tinkering with the basic structural plans for a simple home was a booklet that contained easily understandable graphic instructions - exactly like the ones that come with IKEA furniture, albeit a lot thicker - that enable regular people like you and me to construct a home for the needy.
Each build takes place over long weekends involving 30-odd people that comprise of teenagers, students, retirees, young adults, locals and foreigners (Germans, Australians, Swedish, Koreans, Americans, Iraqis amongst others) alike. These people are then divided into teams that are tasked to build different parts of the house.
The only requirement from volunteers is for them to attend one training course (for RM125) at EPIC prior to the build - that's it, and thus far, all the 17 homes that they have built over the past three years have stood up to the harsh tropical elements and as Oei jokingly put it, "none of them have collapsed yet!".
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| by FZ Video Team |
There are 834 Orang Asli villages across Peninsular Malaysia, and EPIC's five-year-goal is to connect all of those villages to the city through relationships built between urban and rural people, as well as to have active participation from government, corporations and the general public who will be driving the initiative.
Each home built by EPIC costs RM40,000 that is sponsored by corporations who are investing in their Community Service programmes or as team-building activities for their staff, or by crowd funding.
Seventy-five percent of this RM40,000 goes into the purchase of raw materials, while 8% goes into technical supervision, 7% into logistics, 6% to community outreach, 2% into tools and equipment and 2% into warranty.
The 17 houses EPIC helped set up are mostly in Selangor and Perak and they have their sights set on eventually having volunteers organise their own builds instead of having to go through EPIC so that homes can be built simultaneously over long weekends to increase the number of homes that can be built each year.
Oei, however, declares that the team at EPIC has one far-into-the-future, utopian goal: for every Malaysian to be able to custom-make their own homes.
"Think about it. We are all forced to buy pre-made homes and then dump a whole load of money into doing renovations and interior designing to suit our tastes.
"Why should we have to do that? With the rising cost of pre-developed homes, it would one day make more sense to build our own homes sans the costs of architects and raw materials," he explained.
"We hope to someday invent an app that has all sorts of house-building 'parts' that you can drag and drop onto a canvas to design your own home. Once you're satisfied, you can place an order and we'll deliver the raw materials to you... and you can either build the house yourself, or have a contractor do it for you."
Far-fetched as the idea seems, it is conceivable seeing as technology has progressed leaps and bounds in the last decade. Who knows, maybe in five years' time, you and I will be able to build the home of our dreams without having to first be millionaires!
For more information about EPIC Collaborative, please visit www.epichome.org or email [email protected].
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| An EPIC-built home. |
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| Teamwork. |
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| Epic Collaborative CEO John-Son Oei: The idea for EPIC Homes came about after seeing the plight of the Orang Asli. |
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| "Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much" - quote by Helen Keller. |
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