Sunday 4th October

We were up at 6am with breakfast ready at 6.30am. Breakfast consisted of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. I’m a little fussy with food, so stuck to eggs and toast, with lots of black coffee to try and re-hydrate from what was a surprisingly warm night. We then had time to get plenty of water (treated with iodine in my case) ready for the warm, hard day we had ahead. We left camp at around 7.15am for the short walk up to the village and the school.
Our camp was in a small clearing to one side of a dried up river bed. The river bed was extremely sandy, but was the most direct route to the project site. We were surprised to hear that the river was actually running, but a meter below the surface. It was possible to dig down 50cm or so and find water, and it was obvious that this has been done in a few spots.

As it was a Sunday, the kids weren’t in school so it was quite strange walking through the empty school, with just a few goats wandering around the playground. The school has clearly benefited from other projects in the past and whilst extremely basic, was in fairly good shape. However, the kitchen which is used to make meals for the 200 day pupils was in a major state of disrepair and this was to be our project for the next 3.5 days.

The first thing we had to do was to carefully dismantle the existing structure as we wanted to reuse as much as it as possible or let the local community have whatever we didn’t need. Building materials were very scarce and extremely valuable in this environment. Within an hour, the old building was neatly stacked to one side and we were starting to break out the remaining concrete and excavate the base of the wooden pillars.

The aim of the first day was to have done all the ground work and form the basic structure to the new building. With everyone pitching in and pulling their weight, this was comfortably achieved even in the 35 degree heat that we would have to get used too.