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The village men stand around a
table, drinking tea and listening to the village's battery operated
radio. |
| Piled into the pick-up truck, ready
to head off to the building site! |
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As we passed the primary school,
all the children came out to wave at us and to yell "Waso-zotye" (good
morning!). The response is "wuroongi" (I'm fine). |
| As we drove to the site, the masons
rode behind us with bags of cement on their bicycles. We offered
to put them in the truck, but they refused - they are quite used to
carrying that much weight on their bicycles. |
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Here is the house as it stood when we arrived on the first building day. The foundation had been laid and the corners up to the level of the windows had been erected. |
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Reverend Charles, the reverend of
the local Baptist church, shows us how to mix mortar. The
reverend was like our chaperone, always there to make us feel at home
and comfortable. He is raising money to build an orphanage for
the hundreds of children in Muterere who have lost their parents to
AIDS and other ailments.
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(From left to right) Mike, Joy,
Shannon, Juanita (barely visible!) and Stephanie work on laying the
first row of bricks for one of the house's walls. |
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but surely, progress is made! In the background can be seen three
mud and grass huts - the typical home for a family in rural Uganda. |
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In order to save money, we created
a mixture of one part mortar to four parts dirt. This made our
mortar stretch five times as long and they have found it manages to
hold the house together quite well. |
| Mike had a knack for laying bricks
and quickly became our resident expert. Here, he is using a
string to make sure the bricks are level. |
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At
10am each day, the women who lived in the surrounding huts would serve
us tea and a snack. This day, our snack was roasted
peanuts. The tree under which we are all sitting is called a jack
fruit tree. We would have jack fruit in the coming days and it
was delicious! |
| The
local workers would sit under the shade of the huts drinking their tea
despite our requests for them to join us...as time went on, we became
more comfortable with each other and by the end, they would sit with us. |
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Marian and I laying bricks.
Marian was an investment banker in New York City until a year ago when
she decided she needed a change of pace. Since then, she has been
traveling, snow boarding, building houses - you name it. She is
one of the most impressive people I have ever met. |
| I fell in love with the baby goats
wandering around. Whenever we weren't building in the house, they
would wander it and check it out. Eden and I adopted this one and
decided we were going to take it home - wonder how customs would feel
about that? |
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Eden with our goat - I thought this
picture would look best in black and white. Eden is a former
model, actress and producer who currently lives between New York and
L.A. doing make-up and working with the stars. She is so much fun
to be around! |
| The children in the village were
all so beautiful! This is the daughter of one of the women living
around the house - I never got her name but she was incredibly sweet
and was always wanting to play with us. |
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Here, the owner of the house has
arrived and is kneeling down to hug and thank us. We all felt
awkward being kneeled to, so we began to kneel as well - this caused no
shortage of laughter from the locals :-) |
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This is a typical mud-grass
hut. The walls are made of tree branches stuck in the ground with
mud caked in-between. Despite the fact that it is made of straw,
the roof holds water better than the tin roofs we had over our heads at
night. These houses will stand for decades - they are incredible
works of architecture.
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Here, a group of children looks on
while a woman makes matoke (see day 3 featured dish) from banana leaves. |
| Lunch
was served at 2pm each day. Here, we are eating
(counter-clockwise from the bottom) rice, posho, beef, chicken, aiva
(two plates) and potatoes. The chicken we ate was typically
slaughtered about an hour before we ate it. |
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Here is how the house stood at the
end of the first building day. With sixteen people working on
brick walls, they tend to go up quickly, but the most difficult parts
were yet to come. |
| Do you remember Farhan from the day 3 photo gallery
(on the far right)? Here, he has brought some of his school work
to show me. The bluebooks they use are typically donated and
never in good shape. These children have to study under
incredible conditions (more on this later). |
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