Second Team Arrives!!!!

Our partner, Developing World Connections, is a volunteer tourism company. We work with DWC by giving their teams access to Maai Mahiu and development projects. The newest team is made up of 9 students from the University of Toronto. Many of them are journalism majors. This team is staying the longest yet for CTC, 5 weeks. This team is staying in Maai Mahiu and have come with the goal of building. All building projects this year are focused on Ngeya Primary which is the government school in MM that is severely under funded. With 2000 students and an average of 75-100 students per class you can imagine the chaos. The first team, Bodwell High School, finished a new kitchen as you have seen from previous blogs. Now the next goal is to turn the old kitchen, first picture, into what it was originally meant for, a classroom. The team is on their 3rd day of work today, Wednesday. This post will have many updates as they are here for many weeks and working on 3 distinct projects.

First, they will complete this classroom with a new concrete floor, windows, doors and blackboards. From there they'll move to the adjacent classroom and put in windows, doors and fix parts of the existing floor. Finally, they move across the school compound to finish a 3rd classroom with a concrete floor, dirt currently, windows, doors etc. In the end, they will have made 3 classrooms in good working order.

To put in a floor in Maai Mahiu is hard labour to say the least. I feel sometimes it looks more like a chain gang. There are no machines or electricity. So all the large rocks have to be pounded down to make a flat floor. All 40 bags of concrete have to be manually mixed, carried and poured. Walls have to be concrete spackeled by hand. The first two days have been A LOT of work for the team but they have stepped up. Rocky is really proud. I have included a few pics of these days and will update as things get completed. The kids at Ngeya, who are in school right now, find the visitors truly mesmorizing. It's hard for the DWC group to stay focused sometimes as the kids are hard to resist. But DWC has done a fabulous job staying on course.

Thanks to DWC and this team, there will be 3 beautiful classrooms for the students at Ngeya Primary!!!!!