Nelson Mandela Day
by Abby Walsh
With most of the materials finally on site and the
nation-wide energy of Mandela Day with us, we began a very successful and
productive day at Slovo Hall!
Due to the first two days of build week being spent on
finding necessary materials and the transport thereof, an objectives meeting
for the rest of the week was of paramount importance. After a well-deserved
dinner at Mapara’s last night, the group decided to allocate team members to
the different jobs which needed to be completed by the end of Mandela Day. With
the main objective of closing the hall, a focus was placed on building the brick
walls and cleaning and installing the window frames.
Mr. Frank Mapara, hard at work.
A donation of building sand and cement from Takolias as well
as the generous delivery of bricks from Corobrik, meant that the building team
could focus on completing the seating walls of the hall. The students relied
heavily on the experience and expertise of the community members for this.
After a long debate and consideration of all opinions as well as Frank Mapara’s
guidance, we were able to solve the level problems of the hall’s floor and the
position of the existing steel structure which affected the laying of bricks
and the wall height.
Adjacent to the wall building team was a very hard working
window cleaning team (comprised of ladies of course!). Despite the limited
cleaning resources, they made do with what they had and made headway with a
very tedious job.
Kiana woke up very early this morning to fetch and deliver
the shade cloth and cement from Rustenburg which she kindly organised. She
still managed to get to Slovo before
lunch!
A donation of 30 x 2litres of soda drinks for the hardworking team gave everyone some new energy.
Julia and her team prepared lunch at Maparas and at 14:00 we had fried chicken and pap.
The confidence and productivity of the team seemed to
attract the interest of other community members and soon we had many willing
volunteers.
With an increase in helping hands and availability of
resources (especially that of a much needed generator!) numerous tasks began
taking place simultaneously: Kiana and Tialize took charge of measuring the
timber for the seating and the shade cloth to attached to the colonnade. The
JCP students made use of their welding skills to fix the children’s gym donated
by Omar’s family. Omar did what he does best, which is project manage everyone
and the building activity on site.
Kiana measured out the sizes needed to make seating from old wood palettes which were sanded down on day 1.
A trip to the water plant down the road, gained us a bakkie load of aggregate for concrete. And to our dissapointment, we still short some riversand, and off to Takolias we went. We managed to get a load of riversand, and started mixing concrete to cast the footings.
Everyone was ecstatic when the delivery from Akhane Construction came at 16:30, and we started to unload the overwhelming amount of materials. What an amazing end to a very hard day of work!
Photos by Ingmar Büchner