Building a School; Changing Lives!
Talking to Wendy Brown of the Cove Team in Seje
The progress on the elementary school building is clipping along. Over the last 3 days, the team, the contractor, and the community of Seje have been able to lay 17 courses of brick. The last 4 courses will go on tomorrow and than the team will also finish off a cement lintel around the perimeter of the school building wall! If things go as planned they will begin the initial frame work for the roof and hopefully finish the building completely by next week!
Despite a couple of upset stomachs ... and one team member who has been sick the last couple of days ... Wendy stated "We are so glad that we are here. We received such a warm welcome from everyone".
The team has been able to distribute some of the supplies that they have taken along to the teacher of the school. The more time the team spends in the community the more need they are seeing. One story that Wendy told me was how the team was really affected to see what rough shape the children in the village were in. When they asked the teacher what they could do, she asked them if they could buy medicine for the children. The team purchased 60 USD worth of medication for 80 children to use over the next 3 months. The orphan girl who dropped to the ground with fatigue from malaria the other day is on the path of recovery; Wendy stated that she has more energy and that the fever has begun to go away.
Despite this being the rainy season, there is less rain in the area than in most years. The black 10,000 L tank which was installed a few weeks ago is collecting water from the roof of the church when there are heavy downpours. It is being used to supply water for the mortar for the building and for clean drinking water for the community. The results of the second geo-survey for the water well are to come in tomorrow. At the moment it is unclear whether it will be possible to continue to drill for water in the area and this geo-survey will indicate what is possible and what is not. At the present moment the team, Edgar, and the community are exploring what other possible solutions may be out there.
The second smaller black water tank was put in front of Mary's house to collect water to care for her family and the orphans in the community. She is one of the leaders who has stepped forward for many years and has actively taken care of many orphans out of her own limited resources.
Here is a picture of Mary (centre with the white head scarf) in front of her house in June 2006
with Pastor Richard (far right) and John and Sandra (HFL). She is a real testimony of showing love and compassion despite ones circumstances! Giving to others in need out of her own poverty. I am scheduled to talk to the team again on Friday ... hopefully they will have the cell phone/bluetooth/computer networked in order to update the blog by then! If not I will post another update!
Cheers,
Tim,
HFL Project Manager
1 Comments:
Hey guys!
We just got sent a whole bunch of updates from Mike. He asked us to pass them on to you.
You are welcome to copy them over from our site or simply link to the team blog that we have set up on our site @ http://www.seje.org/blog.
Thanks for your updates over the past few days. We were all quite in the dark before we read your posts.
Take care,
Matt
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