Two executives from CALA Homes are preparing to fly out to Cambodia on a charity mission next month.

Andy Pennell, director of affordable housing, and technical manager Paul Carter at the housebuilder’s regional head office in Wooburn Green will be part of a group of 10 from CALA offices across the UK heading for a makeshift settlement in Battambang Province.

It will be the second time the developer’s Chiltern region has supported volunteers from across the globe to build houses in a village where even clean water and electricity are a luxury.

Land director Andrew Aldridge was the sole representative from the Wooburn Green office on the 2017 trip.

He is pictured in the front row next to training and development manager Rachel Dillon. Craig Leishman from CALA’s East of Scotland region is in the row behind, standing next to villager Chin Sreysros, the 27 year old motor bike mechanic who now lives in the house that he as a novice builder and the team of professionals from CALA helped to build in the space of a week. Chin shares it with his wife and two daughters. The girls were 18 months and three when the family moved into their posh new home the Christmas before last.

Between them the 250 volunteers in 2017 built 29 homes to bring the number of houses built of blocks of compressed earth in the village up to 80.

When he got back Andrew said he hoped to go back with a team of as many as 15 the following year.

“We were all shocked by the conditions that so many people living in,” he told the Free Press. “Like most people I donate to charities but to build a house and see the joy on the faces of the family who will live in it was life changing.

“The majority [of the shacks] were very simple made from corrugated iron with little protection from the sun and rain. Houses were often on stilts to offer some protection from flood waters.

‘We worked flat out each day in temperatures up to 38 degrees.

“The house we built consists of a single room four and a half metres wide by seven and a half metres deep with a partition in one corner for a shower and a toilet.

“The ceiling was open to the wooden rafters covered with corrugated tin. The same sized house next door was going to be home to a family of five, a retired police officer, his wife and their three children aged 15, 11 and nine.”

When Chin’s house was finished they held a ribbon cutting ceremony, same as builders do in Bucks when a development is completed. “The reward for doing something so immediately tangible in terms of benefits will be up there as one of the most profound moments in my life,” said the land director. In his day job for CALA, he buys sites for developments of homes in double figures, if not treble.

Although he’d hoped to go back, he won’t be among the team from Wooburn Green flying out to Cambodia on February 4 but in fact his commitment to the charity dedicated to improving living conditions on the Indo-china peninsular has stepped up several notches.

Since 2017 Andrew has qualified as a team leader for the organising charity Habitat for Humanity Great Britain.

This week he returned from Guatemala where he has been volunteering with the Residential Development Agents Society, repairing homes and installing smokeless stoves to help alleviate diseases often associated with heating homes and cooking using open fires in houses where there is little or no ventilation.