Recent News

12 December 2009 – A Christmas Construction Card

I’m pretty sure this is the last time I’ll talk to you this way before I fly out on the 18th. So this is my best hurried attempt to lay out the last couple of weeks, at least with regard to the construction. Lots else has happened, Brit has left, the NGO application is slogging its way through some deep water, the rains haven’t come, Wilson is visiting, a million other things, and tempus, as usual, fugit.

The last time you saw the children’s house they were short. Now they’re taller. Even with the shortage of timber from Uganda, they are growing.

[Show as slideshow]

It's been a while since you've seen what's going on with the kids houses.

These wall panels are fabricated at the workshop and then brought here.

And raised into place.

Like this very first one.

Then we reenact the barn-raising scene from "Witness."

Minus the fried chicken and the cool Amish hats.

All the seasoned timber is nailed together straight as an arrow.

And clamped to make sure all the angles are right.

I stopped by the workshop the other day and saw some of our panels

and trusses being finished.

The next day they were here.

Now all the framing is done

and the trusses will go up on Monday.

We’ve spent a good deal of the fortnight working on a home for the rainwater storage tanks.

[Show as slideshow]

Once the seemingly endless job of excavating the area for the water storage tanks was done, we needed to pour the six concrete foundations.

We needed forms for them. Each foundation is 12' 4" in diameter. So Opyio took some of our recycled construction lumber and made cuts for and aft

so the straight boards could bend

and hold hands and make a circle.

Meanwhile, we were setting the posts

in two feet of concrete that with some chain link and barbed wire and heavy poly sheeting will form the retaining wall.

And dumping a half dozen Bedford loads of our murram

to level the curved, sloping cut.

We wet it and packed it.

'Til it looked like this.

We set Opyio's round form, braced it with quarried stones, lined the bottom with 1000ml poly sheeting, laid in the steel reinforcing, all under Flat Stanley's supervision.

We fired up Al's Birthday mixer and dumped bucket after bucket off the small cliff into rotating wheelbarrows

and dumped it into the unbroken circle.

Distributed it throughout.

Dumped some more.

Hired some questionable help.

Fashioned it by hand

and foot

into this.

The next couple of days looked a lot the same,

but we had six of them soon enough.

The rest of the time we’ve been working to connect the tanks to the roofs.

[Show as slideshow]

We needed to dig again. Sometimes it seems we are gophers. What we do is move dirt. Here we're digging the trenches that will house the 4 and 5 inch pipes that will carry the rain water from the roofs to the storage tanks.

The one to the kitchen/administration building needed to be long and straight.

And the others branched off from it

at exactly forty five degrees to the children's houses

to match all of the connectors which will tie them together.

They are all one foot wide and two feet deep.

If you fell in slow motion into one

it would look

like this.

Merry Christmas from all your friends here to you and your families. If you all came here, we’d go to the coast, Mombasa, like lots of folks here do, and swim in the Indian Ocean and buy each other sunscreen with bows attached.

David

Posted on December 12th, 2009 by david
Filed under: Recent News | 8 Comments »

25 November 2009 – Whoaaa Baby!

It’s safe to say that in the last couple of years the Toyota pick has been called on to carry and haul and transport everything from A to Zed, as they say. I’m not sure what item has held down the “A” spot up to now, maybe anti-venom, but the new, undisputed “A” spot holder is amniotic fluid.

I came back to the property after lunch on Tuesday. The unflappable Gilbert told me that Mildred, who had spent the morning at the Mutongoni Clinic in Athi River for a scheduled check up before her Dec 19 due date, felt like she needed to go back. She had taken a motor bike taxi in. Implicit in his statement was the request that I take her. Very unusual for Gilbert. I said sure.

Mildred came over wearing a beautiful, vivid purple outfit. She looked a little uncomfortable.
But I don’t think any of us thought that seven kilometers of rocky, bumpy, dirt back road and seventeen minutes later she would be holding her newborn baby boy in her arms. But that’s jumping ahead.

She got in the truck and I figured she was having some Braxton Hicks contractions. Mildred is no sissy, and when the first in-truck contraction hit, about thirty seconds into the ride, I knew there was nothing false about this labor. Mildred’s throes were relatively non-verbal, just some high pitched noises like someone walking on too hot pavement, but her body language was very loud. Sabobo was uncertain whether or not I was under attack, and he added his two cents to the small cab chaos.

Mildred’s English is better than my Swahili, but not a lot. “Coming out!!” however, needs little translation. Things got considerably wetter about half way there. I was driving as fast as I could on this terrible road, trying to avoid the deciding bump that would fully add one more to our number. We screeched up to the clinic, grabbed Mildred’s stuff and slowly hurried in. There was talk in passing about id cards, and health cards, but we didn’t stop. I barked a couple of things and Mildred was in the delivery room. The nurse took a gander and said, “Head!” Less than two actual minutes later I heard Maelwayne crying.

We settled into the administrative stuff at the desk. As it turns out, after a very long, much delayed process, Gilbert had gotten Mildred’s National Health card from Machakos yesterday. I plopped it on the counter and that was that…no bill.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any photos of the Cannonball Run. But everything important follows.

[Show as slideshow]

Maelwayne Andere. Named for Mildred's grandfather. Not sure, but he looked to be in the six pound range.

I brought Gilbert and David to the Mutongoni Clinic a little while later. This, by the way, is the first place we brought Mbini that night a couple of years ago when she was about to deliver Anna. They refused her entry then, saying they didn't take first deliveries. Mbini just got married, and lives in Machakos with Anna and her new husband.

David wasn't sure about the whole thing, and was more interested in the buttered bread and tea they had brought Mildred.

He was just happy to be back with his mom who had been gone most of the day.

The Andere's. Now four strong. Gilbert says it's going to stay that way.

Mildred and Maelwayne and the black dog, in his customary spot, the next morning, getting ready to head home.

So Happy Thanksgiving, from all of us — plus one.

David

Posted on November 25th, 2009 by david
Filed under: Recent News | 12 Comments »

24 November 2009 – All It Takes To Get Tanked

We finished the floor about a week ago, and are getting ready to start the polishing. We’ll use Lord wax mixed with kerosene, and a rag, and go at it for some days straight. But for now, here’s the end of our getting here story.

[Show as slideshow]

Laying down the two inches of mortar in the great room. All under the watchful eye of the site level.

One of the administrative offices off the great room. Finished a day earlier, and now luxuriously underwater.

David adding cement to make the mixture drier.

Finishing the concrete on the steps into the main patio.

And putting the colored layer on.

Frosting the big room.

The last bit.

Japolo wasn't satisfied with a few spots in the middle section of the room, so he got wet cement bags

and made his way to them, to correct them.

And then backtracked all the way,

covering his tracks to the door.

The finished room.

The room underwater the next day.

If you look closely, you can see three rooms under the water that covered them for a week.

The shovels and pick axes didn’t spend the week getting rusty.

[Show as slideshow]

Here's a series of photos of their work on the area where we will place the six twenty four thousand liter tanks that will store our harvested rain water. It took about two weeks of very hard work. The black cotton soil is more like rock than dirt.

The digging was done with pick axes and mattocks, then the hard chunks were thrown out one-by-one.

Lunch time one day.

The result is a cavity about sixteen feet wide and four feet deep, a dog leg right par three.

[Show as slideshow]

The first tank showed up today. 11.5 feet in diameter and about nine feet tall.

It weighs about 1500 pounds.

We needed to get it into place in the big dig without wrecking it or us.

We hooked a couple of very strong straps and some rope to the Bedford and rolled it down in a controlled fashion.

It was a pretty straightforward deal.

But we needed to get it upright and in place. After a lot of head scratching, we decided we needed two big hooks could attach to our straps and the lip of the tank without damaging it.

We used heavy rebar, Y-12, and various parts of the truck

as fulcums for bending the stubborn stuff,

until we wound up with two of these.

The first attempt we used a single strap, unsuccessfully.

Round two, we used both hooks and sent the straps around both sides of the tank and joined them to a single strand which was attached to a big hook on the front bumper of the Bedford.

All we managed to do was spin the tank around

and put it really out of place. I was worried about damaging the tank, smashing one or two of the guys, and thinking about the other five tanks we had to place here. We fumbled around for a half hour or so, until one of our efforts paid off,