Following the quake, Lari traveled to Kashmir to help displaced people repair and rebuild their homes using mud, stone, wood and other debris. Since then, she has continued that work while training volunteers to reconstruct and repair in their communities; teaching women restoration craft skills; experimenting with low-cost, zero-carbon, zero-waste building materials and techniques; and always encouraging and empowering people to support themselves and their communities—not only as designers and architects, but as entrepreneurs.

The first and foremost strategy of Lari and her team is “humanistic humanitarianism”, a methodology to teach people to build themselves and do everything self-sufficiently, and then go on to teach others, for a small fee. Her motto is “zero carbon, zero waste, zero donor, which I think leads to zero poverty.” In the context of the climate emergency, much of the training is about disaster preparedness: how to build a stove that uses clean and safe energy for cooking even amidst a flooding catastrophe; methods of planting and storing food and water safely; designing and building hygienic bathrooms; strategies for how to create an emergency shelter. The system involves the teachers, very often women, being paid a very modest fee. In that way, the lessons can be afforded and they can share their knowledge, but primarily this means that they are not reliant on a form of capitalist philanthropy, and also that there is some form of financial prosperity embedded into the program.

In a conversation with Alice Rawsthorn for her podcast Design Emergency, Lari said: “Disasters are constantly increasing in their severity. In Pakistan, just last year about 33 million people were displaced, and which means that something like 3 million households today are without shelter, without food, with literally nothing. And that is the tragedy of countries like ours, which are frontline states which suffer. And before we get the chance to have people come up to a certain level another disaster strikes. So almost every year we've been confronted with either an earthquake or a flood.”

Despite Lari’s background in the mainstream construction industry, the materials that she and her team use are anything but concrete and steel. Instead they primarily use bamboo, because it can be affordable for everyone. Lari spoke to Design Emergency about the beauty of transferable skills that she discovered in many of the women she teaches when using natural materials like mud, earth, lime and bamboo.

In Pakistan, the coming years are a source of great anxiety. As with many of the peoples in the Himalayas, they are observing the melting glaciers of the great range, the increasing number of extreme weather events, and the inevitable humanitarian disasters will inevitably appear in rapid succession. In this context, the answer is not found in repeating the mistakes of a post-colonial practice of funneling money or materials on a temporary basis. Lari’s version of radical repair is one of patience and care, and of the long-term empowerment that knowledge and economics can bring.