Nkungulutale Construction

This morning I woke up to the Muslim call to prayer echoing through the village from the local mosque. After Namatovu and I had prepared ourselves for the day, we headed to the car parked outside. As I was standing, waiting for our driver to arrive, Namatovu pulls out the keys and hops up into the driver's seat! Culturally in Uganda, it is very rare for women to drive, so I was surprised when she told me that she had got her license! She explained to me that transporting all the materials for the construction projects (projects that I explain below) was becoming very expensive, so she got her license so she could cut down on the transportation costs, ultimately lowering the price of the entire project.

 We arrived in the village of Nkungulutale where the Mwebaza Foundation is currently constructing a secondary school building that will serve the students of this community and the graduates of Mwebaza Primary School. Please click here to learn more about this project. In regards to the construction, not much had been done since the last time I saw it when I visited last summer, but this was expected since we are also building another school structure for the students of St. Paul Primary School. St. Paul is partnered with Coyote Ridge Elementary in Broomfield, CO. For more information on this partnership, please click here.

We agreed to build the new school structure for St. Paul first, since it currently has students taking classes in a wooden shed-like structure with dirt floors whereas this new secondary school is not serving any students at the moment. Ideally, we would be constructing both schools at once however business in Uganda is run much differently than business in the U.S. - every item is bargained for. As you can imagine, this is a very time consuming process. Not to mention, the reason for today's visit to Nkungulutale was to confirm that the amount of bricks we were receiving was the amount of bricks we had paid for. It is difficult to get anything done quickly here when you have to oversee every step in fear that someone will be skimming off the top.

The picture below depicts the secondary school foundation that was laid last year and a brick "kiln", which was where they made our bricks. It's a fascinating process actually, they hand make bricks out of mud, then stack them in a block, as you can see in the picture. They leave some small holes in the bottom of the block where they start a fire and let it burn for many days until the bricks have dried. After that, it takes a few a days for the block of bricks to cool, then they are ready to use!