In 2019, the great leaders of the local church invited an Architect named Ar. Boy Sembiring to design the Grand Design of the historical Buluh Awar village. Then, Ar. Boy Sembiring invited Ar. Franky Simanjuntak and Ar. Freddy Simamora for a collaboration. We surveyed the village to identify its potential, problems and issues.
We met the village priest named Wilson Tarigan who was also in charge in running the tourism programme. He explained that the tourism was not in a good shape since the local villagers were less in participation.
Meanwhile, we explained that the involvement of the villagers were the key to achieve greater vision of community based tourism.
Therefore, we arranged several numbers of FGDs with the local church, the villagers and the government. We educated that the community based tourism and bamboo optimization were the approriate solutions.
Fortunately, we gained trust for collaboration from the respective stakeholders. After the grand design was approved, we started to prepare for the KAKR bamboo hall as the trigger for convincing action.
The local church committee initially proposed to select Contractors to bid since it was the usual method they carried out. But we insisted to involve community in the construction as we selected three local villagers as the management team helped by an architectural freshgraduate to daily supervise the work while we the architects do the mentoring.
In addition, we invited a skilled bamboo expert from Java to train the local villagers. After three months, the expert left and the villagers continued until its completion.