Die Schule bebt!

Dear Friends

Today, it’s happening! It’s all starting! It’s the day of the days! 

We started at 7am in the morning to get the water access: we failed. No water man (and therefore no handshaking and visitor book) could be found. The water man responsible for our area seems to have vanished. No trace of him. So still no running water. But let’s excuse him, he might have had something more important to do: e.g., finding the problem that once again left the whole of Kimilili without water since this morning. 

Alternative washing: using a moist tissue (this one has just been used on the face...)

But after this first early disappointment, we got the jackpot: TOILETS! Well, they are not ready yet but we started the building of the student’s toilets (thanks to Vicki and her friends!). This is how far we got today:

Testing the toilets...

The holes are covered with woods and the material needed is on the ground. Next steps are to cement the floors and construct the walls (with bricks). Great excitement amongst students and teachers with today’s development!

But this is not all!

We also started two new temporary school classes:

Building up the structure.

 The current financial situation forced us to prioritize. We had two options:

1.  Build one permanent (with bricks) school class, leaving us with six class rooms in total for 7 grades. Or
2. Build two temporary (with mud) class rooms catering for all grades AND buy the additional land (where the toilets are currently build on)

We decided to go with option two due to the following reasons:

• Ministry of education requires a certain size of the school area to allow for a playing ground for the kids. The current land owned by CBSM is not sufficient. Therefore, additional land is essential

• Toilets need to have a certain distance to the school building and could therefore not be built on our current land. Given we are constructing permanent toilets (bricks), it is wise to own the land we are building on
• The situation of sharing class rooms is unbearable and impacts the concentration level of the students. Two additional class rooms will solve that problem

We would like to thank our friends and families for the huge support. Only through your kind donations, we managed to improve the current situation of CBSM significantly. In this blog we are mentioning where your donations have been used (some donations are still waiting to be spent!). We would like to thank Rebecca and Jürg, Matthias and Anita and Ursula and Wolf for making it possible to buy the land (exact amount still to be discussed with land lord). The school building has been donated by Kaspar and Julia, Myriam and an anonymous donater. (A side note: please don’t think we are not funding investments ourselves: we are adding wherever needed. Please feel free to ask if you would like further details on what we funded)

Speaking about “Thanks”, we got one ourselves for the following:

Our new School sign.

We did not only manage to paint the school sign ("we" meaning Alex), but also our trousers ("our" meaning Agnes’). Once dry, we will hang it up on the fence.

Maybe Agnes got a bit too much sun today??

 We’ll close the blog for today with some of the faces you soon might get to know back home:

"Is this white monster going to drink my tea?!?"

Baby class Teacher`s and Agnes.

Another Bruno...

Teaching in the outside (due to lack of school classes).

Alex and her big love Ima!

 Our daily way to School and back home...

Shops on the main street

Big hug to everyone

Alex & Agnes