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Week Three's Work is Complete

Another week begins and again these Burundian workers put most of us to shame. They work hard and conscientiously in the hot sun. Keep in mind that after a weeks work the experienced brick layers earn about £7. To them this is a very good wage.

Here you see the shuttering for the foundation walls being formed:

By the end of the week the foundation walls are almost up to floor level. Because the area is prone to flooding  we are having to raise all the levels by about 600mm (24"). We will import hundreds of cubic m3 of ground to raise the levels so most of these foundation walls will be below ground when finished:

The drainage pipes have to be accommodated within the walls. What you are seeing here are sections of a banana trees trunk within the wall. As the wall dries out the trunks will shrink and will be easily removed so that we can feed the pipework through:

This is Jean Samanderi and his family. Jean is the local administrator for the region of Gatumba (Where we are building) and airport etc. He is being very supportive of what we are doing and came with his two armed policemen to pick us up from the airport and escort us back to our home in Bujumbura. He very kindly invited us along with one of the MI teams for a meal in his house. Our kids played cards with his:

Things are done very differently in Burundi. There are no B&Q's or local builders merchants that will just deliver the materials for you. As we have done many times already, this day we went to the area of town where you can hire a driver and his truck. You agree a price and then head into market. No one expects you to handle the materials your self. Once you agree on a price for the materials you then hire the local men that are waiting to help load the materials into your truck. They are not employed by the materials seller but they seem to be approved by them. In this case they loaded up our truck with 40no x 50kg bags of cement and received the equivalent of 88p to divide between them all. We are obviously being advised as to what is an acceptable and good payment.

This last picture is of one of the many small houses that exist behind our building project. This is one of the better buildings as it has a timber frame and then coated with mud. However we know that the area regularly floods so this and the many hundreds of houses here obviously  end up partly submerged in water every year. There is no drainage infrastructure here so all the waste is going into what is basically a hole in the ground. I can't imagine just how dangerous these floods must be for their health with the flood waters mixing with the waste.