Kirenga Primary School: A New Start

We visited Kirenga to start work on the completion of the toilet block. This is an interesting project as:

1. We will trial the new thin shell concrete roofing system
2. We will construct a low cost rain water harvesting system.
3. The building will incorporate a sitting toilet for volunteers and overseas guests
4. The toilet will incorporate a much improved ventilation system.

It might seem strange to get excited about constructing an oversize outback dunny but this project incorporates a lot of new ideas that will be widely useful for village houses and classrooms. As well as building the toilet we are going to build a small gazebo with a domed roof to test the thin shell concrete in a domed shape.. The only use of this building is to provide a nice little place for the kids to sit and chat but it will be a prototype for a whole range of domed houses. Round houses are traditional in Africa and by building in this way we can fit the houses to the culture. The cost estimates for this system indicate that the houses will be much cheaper even than the low cost houses built in villages now.

With the last period of work our arrangement was for the village to pay for some of the tradesmen’s costs with funds provided by the District |Education office. We paid for all materials and some of the wages. The village had held back some of the money due to the tradesmen as the work was not up to the standard we require. It was up to us to come and see how the tradesmen had finished the work and to see if we were satisfied.

We most certainly were not. The work was even sloppier than before and it was clear that we would have to employ our own tradesman to finish the work properly. But I could not ask that the tradesmen do the work again as the teachers and villagers themselves had allowed the school to degenerate into a very untidy and dirty condition. It was clear that no effort had been spent on cleaning the school except for sweeping the floors.

As the teachers and school leaders were all assembled I took the opportunity to give them another good talking to. I explained that our job was not to come and spend a lot of money constructing their school and that our main purpose was to provide a good education for the children in a wholesome environment. What we are looking at now certainly isn’t. If we construct a quality school we expect to see it well maintained and the responsibility for that falls on both the teachers and the villagers who own the school.

I then explained our new policy of having our schools development officer chair the school board. Again to my surprise this was well received and there will soon be a village meeting to respond to our letter concerning future development of the school . The village will also donate to us a piece of land to construct a volunteer house using the low cost techniques we are currently developing at the school.

We then went off to start work on the toilet block. After a brief meeting to finalise the design we got into it in the normal way for simple school buildings. With nothing but the roughest sketch done on the spot we marked out the foundations to be dug by the villagers over the weekend. One of the beauties of working in rural Africa is the total lack of government supervision. You just figure out what you want to do and do it. Just to protect ourselves we get a government engineer to approve our work but we have never had our ideas refused.

It was all a very friendly and profitable day with problems resolved and a substantial new beginning..