Upon our arrival, we were greeted by about 25 youth, who were already moving concrete/dirt/termite hill dirt bricks (termite saliva helps to make the substance stick together to make an effective brick). So, after laying down our bags, we joined in. The biggest challenges we found were the extreme heat in the sun, and the immense weight of each brick (being about 60+lbs each), not to mention the distance in which we had to take each brick in order to reach the washroom's foundation (these washrooms were sponsored by the KCI music department). Jane joined in with some of the women who were also carrying bricks, and one of them suggested using her head covering (a scarf curled into a donut-like shape, for easier carrying of items on top of their heads) to carry bricks, though Jane declined after learning through a translator that doing so could be quite painful.
Finally, after an hour of hard labor, the bricks had all been moved, and since Fred had gone off to get materials, we did not have any planned work. So, while the 5 guys sat on the edge of the classroom foundation, Jane went to sit down with some of the women at the build site (technically youth, but married and with children from the age of 16 on). Through some translation, she was surprised to learn that all were mothers already, with one already on her 5th child. The new mother in the group with a 1-month old baby had taken a piki piki 40km with her husband, a driver and of course her baby the day before. At one point, upon discovering that I was the son of Jane, the youngest girl of the group asked to be introduced to me because she is very interested in moving to Canada for a better life.
After about 40 minutes of waiting, Fred returned with Kennedy and barbed wire to give us our next assignment. On the school's land, there is a reasonably sized field of a unique type of casava root. This casava root is endangered due to the lack of rain (given it is the dry season), so the government gave seeds for the root to the school, as the school has the ability to irrigate the crop to keep it alive, and propagate the seeds to keep the strand alive. However, cows are very much free-range around here, so due to the lack of fencing around the garden, it had been very easy for livestock to get in and eat/damage the crop. So, Fred gave us supplies to complete a barbed wire fence around the crop (as almost all of the posts were already placed, less a few that had been stolen). As we started to put up the barbed wire fence, some fundis came over to see what we were working on, and as they started to help us, they slowly pushed us farther and farther from the project, due to the language barrier yet again. In the mean time, we met two local men, one of whom was an engineer who had been working on making bricks earlier in the morning, and the other was a University Student at the University of Dar es Salam studying biomolecular mechanics. Both spoke English very well, so we had a long conversation, comparing weather, culture, food and many other differences and similarities between our two countries. They had many questions about snow, wondering how our roofs stay up and how we don't die if it snows during the night (this is not an exaggeration). Eventually, the time came to leave for lunch, so we thanked the men for the great chat and left for the diocese after the 45 minutes of talking. We were certainly reminded of the importance of not only doing physical work for others while here, but also taking the time to build relationships with the people.
Later on, after our lunch and short break, we headed back to the build site with the expectation of continuing to work at the school. However, upon our arrival, we could not find any English speakers, as most had left, so we found ourselves once again waiting at the school. We waited about 40 minutes before we were able to assist the workers with the moving of some bricks though this was very brief. In the meantime, Dylan and Nathan helped one of the departing workers with his bike chain. This allowed us to make our return to the diocese with enough time to shower prior to our scheduled game of ping pong at the hospital at 4:45. Though we had scheduled a game with Challo and George from the hospital, only Peter and Faustein ended up showing up besides our team (as well as some local kids who came to watch). However, we had some great rallies nonetheless, and returned to the diocese with lots of time to spare before our supper of rice and chicken. While we ate, David took the time to tell us of the significance of serving chicken (or "kookoo") as only high ranked guests or company get served it, which made us feel very honoured and humbled.
Tomorrows plans are for Nathan and I to teach a photography course (with the problem being that the students will not have their own cameras) while the rest of the team are off working at the school again, with hopes to finish the new bathrooms (which we will say more details about tomorrow).
Some sidenotes: First off, we want to take the time to thank Janice and Jeff Beam 1000x for their work of re-posting the blog's content on our behalves back home in Canada. Without them, you wouldn't have read almost all of our blog, so thanks so very much! And, of course, thank you all for reading this blog :)
Back to here, we received the set of fans we ordered prior to coming here and have installed each of them in our rooms, making some very comfortably cool nights of sleep plentiful!