Week two and three

Week two and three continued the work with the foundation.  The team made great progress and lot of time was spent mixing concrete to first fill the foundation trenches and later the whole floor. 

A normal day we wake up at around 6:00, walk the 2.5 km to the site, have breakfast which have been prepared by the weirdest character in the village (a former 5-star hotel chef who shows up serving breakfast in a Santa Claus-hat) and then start the days work.  The breakfast is really good and always with lot of variation.  Lunch is also cooked in the village by some lunch-ladies.  This tends to be more traditional local food but not with a great variation so some people have quickly got bored of the local main dish “matapa”.  Matapa is prepared from coconut milk and peanut paste, cooked together with the leaves from a particular plant.  Sometimes it contains a few small crabs for giving an additional touch to the taste.  The matapa is then eaten with rice and is really wonderful.

Other news is that we have got hold of a cement mixer.  This was a blessing as mixing concrete by hand was a strenuous task, particularly considering the sizes of the rocks.  The cement mixer should however prove to be highly inefficient as it was small and also way past its “best before-date”.  Before week three was over we had already broken it but fortunately, the site manager managed to buy a new mixer that wasn’t too expensive.

Another major job during these two weeks was the levelling of the floor. Since the school is situated on a slightly sloping ground, huge masses of sand was to be transported into the foundation before the floor could be concreted.  There is of course not machines available so the sand was moved using spades, buckets and wheelbarrows.  I estimate that we moved around 50-60 tonnes of sand in total.  The huge hole we dug at the end of the school can probably be used for a septic tank.

A minor frustration is also the many times we run out of material.  To make the concrete, we need a steady supply of rocks, sand and cement.  These demands can be hard to meet considering the reliability of the transport firms in the country.  Therefore, some time had to be spent waiting for more material.