It is very exciting to see the new buildings begin to take shape on the NW side of the campus. The building going up in these photographs will be two classrooms, very much needed for our growing student body.
The goal this year is to have this and a twin beside it built before the “winter” dry season and brick-making for additional buildings on the SE side of the campus. To fill the gap of needed bricks for the current project, Form III and Form IV students are making additional bricks now. The day of digging and clearing grounds for the mud bricks to dry was almost a party; the Form IV students have been doing this work for five years, being involved in the building of Idigima Secondary School from the inception. With their preparation for the National Examinations in October, they will not be involved as much in the building projects this fall. So, the current brick making may be their last,
as Idigima will not be offering Form V next year for them to continue their education here. Perhaps in a future year, some of them who were not able to continue at government schools will return to Idigima when it is an official “Advanced School” offering Forms V and Form VI education. We pray that the Lord will bless us to be a part of that great day.
The pictures offered here for your review show the progression of the building process that has taken place with each of the buildings on the campus. We have sorted through all our photo files (from 2009-2011) to select photos of the various stages. Enjoy!
To prepare the ground for making bricks, the vegetation must be scraped off and the ground broken up. Students line up and use their “chapikazi” to loosen the soil.
The students joke that they are digging for precious metals, but they know that their education is more valuable than any metal they will find from digging (See Job 28).
While the boys are digging up the soil for the making of bricks, the girls thrash the grassy field that will be used to row the mud bricks for drying.
Irrigation ditch water is routed into the brick field, where the students dig and stomp the soil into mud suitable for filling the brick forms. They literally run from the mud field to the drying field; each student and Form/Class has a quota of bricks to make.
The bricks are covered with grass to prevent them from drying too quickly.
They will dry for one or two weeks before being transported (carried by students, in this case over a quarter mile) to the building site for burning.
Bricks are stacked in a very specific pattern to allow the heat of the fires to burn up through the stack of mud/clay bricks for the making of hardened building material.
Notice that the stack is coated with mud after the stack is completed. This traps the heat of the fires inside the stack.
The fires are tended all day, with the students taking turns chopping firewood. The openings are finally “capped” with mud for the stack to finish the firing.
It takes a lot of water and sand for the mixing of cement, especially when it is mixed in a pile on the ground instead of in an automated cement mixer.
Something that may be overlooked in the building projects is the delivery of truckloads of metal roofing sheets, timbers for trusses, and hundreds of 80-pound bags of cement.
The students unload these trucks by hand one piece at a time.
Over the next two days, the timbers were stacked for drying and to keep them from twisting.
Once the new classrooms are available for Joanne’s Pre-Form students, perhaps the remaining timbers will be moved into the storage room she is now using for a classroom.
It is inevitable, as they swarm over the trucks, that a student isn’t later in need of First Aid for a cut, bruise, or scrape. This student got “bumped” by a timber in the recent unloading of this truck.
He went to the dispensary in Mlowo, but received no stitches. When he came for a dressing change, Joanne tried to pull it together with Next Care Band-Aids.
Local villagers are hired for the brickwork. The large bricks make for impressive progress; within days, walls are finished to the level where preparation can be made for the roof trusses. The goal is to have the walls of this two-classroom building up within two weeks.
Standard window frames are constructed in the carpenter’s shop.
The iron rebars are driven through the drilled holes to make the building safe from burglars. The window frames are cemented into place as the walls go up.
Trusses are made on the building site, hoisted into place and secured.
The students haul buckets of sand, broken brick, and rock as fill, which is tamped and leveled before the final layer of cement flat work is spread by hand trowel.
Can you imagine doing a floor this size without a bull float?
With the addition of window “shutters” and doors, some paint, glass, ceiling boards and the cement blackboard, this classroom will be ready to become the home for 60 or 70 students, excited about getting a secondary education.
It is hard to keep current with the number of VST schools registered to provide secondary education in Tanzania; the last we heard, there were 18 open and eight more under construction. VST has schools in five regions, and the leadership is responding to requests by government leaders to work with villagers to bring schools into two additional regions. Praise God for all He is doing to bring His gospel and education to the poverty-stricken youth in villages of Tanzania.
Thank you for your faithful support of us and VST; it makes a world of difference to thousands of Tanzanian students.
Gary and Joanne Grenell,
your hands and feet in Tanzania
