Site Progress

Wednesday morning, Angie and I visited our building site with Dau John Awuou, the head teacher at the village school who acts as our project manager, overseeing the construction and setting meetings with local elders and administrators. Though there's not been as much progress as we'd hoped, the two girls' tukuls (adobe thatched huts), which will each house five girls, and two staff tukuls are nearly complete. The walls have been mudded; the roof is thatched. We're waiting for the mud to dry so it can be "plastered" and for the screened windows and doors to be built and installed by Maduk, a local carpenter and former teacher from Kakuma Refugee camp. Two other tukuls are awaiting a truck to recover the short poles for their foundation walls. The poles have been cut but were left in the bush as a truck hasn't been available. We expect them to be delivered Monday or Tuesday.

Then we went to the school, where the cargo we brought from the US and Nairobi has been stored. We inventoried the items in the bags and boxes and reorganized and marked the boxes for easier access.

Later Dau and I hitched a ride to Rubb Hall, one of two huge metal-framed vinyl-covered storage units put up by World Food Program (WFP). The food, mattresses and bed frames Joseph purchased for us in Bor are stored there. We picked out two twin bed frames, so that we could lift our mattresses off the tent floor. There seemed no rhyme or reason to the selection of side frames, head and footboards. They're all handmade of mahogany (termites leave mahogany alone) but there was no consistent design, and a number system that we couldn't figure out.

Dau and Daniel worked on the pieces we selected past sunset by the light of our battery-powered Coleman lanterns, but only succeeded in putting together one frame—wrong. Then we discovered the numbers did have a purpose. Unfortunately, we had selected the wrong size for only fancy bed—the one with tooled bedposts. So Angie spent another night on a mattress on the tent floor, graciously giving up the finished bed to me.