School for Andy Progress: A Photo Narrative

**Photo Credit: Kayla Galway**

The School for Andy is well on its way! The past month has been incredibly productive.

On June 28^th, we had the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the school. Many people from Buyaya attended to hear speeches from Meaningful Volunteer staff and local officials, bless the school, listen to drummers, and of course, eat delicious food and socialize.

The builders wasted no time getting started!

Bricks were already baked on site.

A trench was dug and filled within the first week

Then came the challenging part: filling the foundation with rocks… which we carried from all over the area.

There was a lot of concrete to be mixed

Which involves lugging a lot of water from the well, which is approx. a quarter mile away.

Meanwhile, we were still teaching classes! Everyone is excited to be learning in the school (instead of our crowded volunteer house porch)

Another week goes by and the walls of that school are built up….

And the school is ready for its roof!

Stay tuned! Photos of roof, windows, door, and painting still to come!

Taken For a Ride or Just the Way Things Are Done?

Working hard on the foundation

In news that is not really surprising, Meaningful Volunteer’s solar powered school has cost more than we thought.

For a start, the initial quote for the materials that the builder gave us was wildly off.  12,000 bricks?  More like 5,000 bricks.  $35 for sand? Try $400 for sand. 20 cents per foot of timber?  40 cents is much closer to the mark.

There was no malice on the part of our builder.  He doesn’t make any profit from the materials. It just makes controlling the budget nigh on impossible.

There also seems to be the unwritten rule in Uganda building contract law: “Builders” do all the technical work, while “porters” do all the heavy lifting, mixing of concrete, moving rocks and so on.

This annoyed me no end to start with.  I kept on thinking: We’re paying you good money.  Why can’t you just move that god damned bag of cement!

And then people would move rocks for us early in the morning without seeking prior approval from us and then expect to get paid.  I was so irate.  I was venting to people around me.  “They can’t do random work for us and then expect us to pay them.  That’s like blackmail.    And I’m sure as hell not gonna be paying them 4,000 shillings for a day’s work.  They can take 1,000 now for the rocks, or 3,000 later for a day’s work.  Either way, I don’t give a shit!”

Once I had calmed down a bit and talked to some people wiser than me – both African and fellow volunteer – I let it go.  It just wasn’t worth the mental toll it was taking on me.  The builder vs. contractor thing is just the way things are done here.  We are not being taken for a ride.

It reminds me a little of concept of time both here and in the Philippines.  When I first arrived in the Philippines, it drove me nuts.  “Let’s meet at midday” somehow meant that turning up at two in the afternoon was perfectly okay.  As soon as I realized that it was the way things were done, I let it go and life got better.

Despite all the stress, the first stage of the school is almost done.  The roof is set to go up on Monday.

I Love Hard Work. I Could Watch It for Hours.

Hard Work Not Done by Me

Day one of our solar school project is successfully under way, but no credit goes to the volunteers.

Day one saw the initial technical tasks undertaken by the Ugandan builders that we contracted.  They spent several hours getting the dimensions of the school exactly square using nails, string, and some branches of nearby trees.

The next few hours were spent digging deep trenches.  Large rocks will be placed in the trenches, followed by much smaller rocks and then the bricks themselves to form the walls.  The dirt from the trenches will be packed back into the trenches to ensure a strong wall.

Today should see a lot more “hard yacka” (as we say in New Zealand) by the volunteers as we move around bricks, rocks, sand, and water.