At Home in the Third World : La Sierra University’s Recreated Dwellings Offer Viewer Sobering Insights

As the large truck pulled onto the one-acre lawn at La Sierra University Terri Whittaker’s eyes grew wide with anticipation.

Heaped high in the back of the truck were her treasures: a filthy mattress, a tattered vinyl chair and, the crowning glory, a brown couch, its insides bursting through a four-inch gash and its right arm broken and dangling to one side.

“We’ve also got a really gaudy striped couch,” she told a visitor proudly.

For the past several weeks, Whittaker, a Hollywood art director, her colleagues and dozens of volunteers have been scavenging through Riverside, gathering a large haul of roadside and back yard refuse that includes tires, siding of an old barn and even an old donkey cart.

The eclectic stash was collected as building material and decorations for “Global Village ‘92,” an unusual exhibit of recreations of nine low-income and Third World “houses” on the La Sierra University campus.

The purpose of “Global Village ‘92,” its organizers say, is to increase awareness among elementary school pupils and university students, as well as the public, of the impoverished living conditions in the less-developed areas of the world.

“The original concept was to bring Third World conditions to the university students, to set up a couple of habitats and have students live in them,” said Alberto Valenzuela, director of communications for Washington-based Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), which is sponsoring the exhibit. “Then we thought, why not make it bigger, make the university students the hosts and let’s invite the community.”

Since Thursday, college students wearing appropriate ethnic costumes have guided hundreds of fifth- and sixth-grade students through the village maze. The public is welcomed after 3 p.m. weekdays and on the weekend through next Sunday.

Visitors are encouraged to walk inside the dwellings, which include a floating totora reed house, common to the Uru people of Lake Titicaca in Peru; a South American urban favela, which is a small shack found mostly on vacant land outside cities that’s built from just about anything, including cardboard, abandoned signs, pieces of plastic and broken-down furniture; a full-size Southeast Asian stilt house and a scaled-down model of an urban American tenement.

Charles Teel, a professor of religion at La Sierra, came up with the global village idea two summers ago, while building a floating school with some of his students in Peru.

“The students come back changed and (looking at) the world through different eyes,” he said. “And we hope to mirror that here.”

Whittaker said she eagerly took on the job a year ago and has found it quite challenging--especially the actual building, which began last month.

“It’s been an adventure finding materials,” she said with a laugh. “In some of it, we’ve taken a bit of creative license and had to improvise on the materials because we’re not in the native environment.”

For instance, she said, the totora reed house left the team at a loss as to where they could find reeds until someone suggested contacting a Los Angeles broom factory. They ended up buying 150 pounds of “hurl”--the cornstalk portion of the broom, which proved a good substitute.

And instead of using mud, sticks and livestock dung to build the Masai kraal --a compound of low-lying huts common to Central Africa--Whittaker opted for more resilient materials--chicken wire for the inside of the five-foot-high circular structure, which she coated with a special spray-on Styrofoam painted a realistic, muddy brown.

“It won’t smell the same,” she said, “but that’s probably to our advantage.”

Casey Bahr, producer of the exhibit, said the road-finds provided some of the best materials.

“It was amazing what we found,” he said. “We saw some corrugated tin that was ideal for the tenement house. Then a group of students were out on a hike and they found some shake siding from an old barn that had fallen down and that was exactly what we needed for the favela. “

And a group of Pathfinders, a youth group affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist church, got permission from county officials to cut bamboo from a county grove, which was ideal for the Asian stilt house.

Bahr said the project cost about $35,000, which included buying the materials that couldn’t be dredged up, hiring a construction crew and paying Whittaker’s art team for designing and developing the dwellings.

Among the greatest design challenges was the last-minute modification of the tenement.

Originally, the 14-foot-high structure was intended to allow the more than 6,000 school-age children expected to visit the village to get inside by climbing up a fire escape and into an open window.

“But fire codes wouldn’t allow that,” Bahr said. “So we adapted the idea and created an alley where you can walk down and look inside the room we’ve created in the tenement.”

Old fencing, garbage cans, a broken-down car and spray-painted graffiti provided an urban feel, while live goats, pigs and chickens help set the ambience for the rural habitats.

The village also includes an old Ford station wagon depicting the lifestyle of a homeless family forced to live in a car; an African refugee camp and a beached Southeast Asian refugee boat. To give the boat an aged, rickety appearance, Whittaker coated it with eight layers of paint and one layer of glue, then blasted it with a heat gun, which created a sun-dried, cracked feel.

Whittaker said actual construction and decoration of the habitat took about 20 days, with help from a professional construction company and students. Many of those same students are maximizing the experience by spending a night in the dwellings, eating only the same quantity of rice and beans as would the indigenous people.

“This lets us role-play the people,” said Christopher Cao, 20, a Global Village tour guide and journalism major. “You come away thinking, ‘My goodness, and I think I have problems.’ ”

John Anthony, 24, a tour guide and pastoral ministries major at La Sierra, said he was shocked to see the small living quarters of the tenement house he helped assemble.

“Something so small, it would be hard for just one person to live in--a whole family would be very difficult,” he said. “I just hope all this helps bring a new train of thought and a new, better humanity.”