All in a day's work

Hello,

All in a day's work.... I find myself doing so many different things in one day here. It is absolutely crazy, and lots of fun.

For example.... I am helping with the gym class and the creative art class at the small school near my house. It has been interesting finding art ideas with the supplies at hand! A little glue sure can go a long way. Here I was making some paper beads with the kids. It was really cute to see all the kids wearing their necklaces and bracelets after. I have pictures of my two favourite kids in the class, I definitely play favourites! This is Saidie, I think she was the most excited about the beads.


This little guy is just so cute! His name is Mustafa and he's pretty much the coolest kid ever.


After having a little fun with the kids in the morning.... I'm off for some manual labour for the afternoon. Rachel and I have been working with a lovely man named Anerico, who is really interested in agriculture. We both pretty much feel in love with him, he is the happiest person I have ever met in my entire life. He is also probably the hardest working person we have met here. Because of this, Rachel decided to use some money that she fund-raised in the UK to build him a chicken house. He has grand plans for a 200 chicken operation, so we have had to reign him in just a little, after much planning and budgeting on the part of Anerico and Rachel, it was decided that the house would be made of mud and would have a large chicken run outside. Most people here tend to keep their chickens right in their house at night and let them run around outside during the day. It's not quite done yet, we were a little delayed with the lack of water that the end of dry season caused, but it is well on the way!
This is the very beginning of our little project.

They did hire a fundi to make the main structure part and put on the roof. The rest, however is up to us to complete!

This included purchasing the smaller sticks from a neighbour and transporting them ourselves!
My arms were certainly sore after a few trips carrying a bundle of sticks.


Here the neighbour has come to help us, He was a welcome addition to our building crew. His name is Hamsa and here we are having a competition to see who can strip the sticks fastest. That's me using a banga!


All the sticks are then nailed to the posts to hold the mud in place. It was a lot of work, but enjoyable, with chapati and beans as a treat at the end.


Even the kids were put to work after they got home from school.


Ahh, doesn't it look beautiful! It's ready for mudding, all we need is the water for mud making.


Anerico thinks that he will be able to have about 100 chickens in here! We are gonna start him off with quite a bit less that that, but hopefully he can grow his flock quickly. He has such big plans for his compound, he really is a pleasure to work with. We are also planning on having a demonstration garden at his house. Tomorrow we are going to start by planting a seed nursery. I will take some pictures and talk about that more in another post.
For now... I'll leave you with an end of the day picture of myself and Rose. She is such a sweetie...