Build week: Day 3

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.

 The 1:1 Pretoria Student League, the JCP students from the University of Pretoria, and Slovo Park community members.

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.

                                                 The seating walls are well on their way.

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.

            3 Engineer students and 3 architecture students trying to figure out basic details.

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

Build week: Day 2

by Tuliza Sindi

Day 2 of build week started with great momentum and the energy was evidant. While some sanded all of the wooden palettes' planks, others marked and dug the holes for the column footings that will support the pivoting windows.

Abby and Kiana, with Frans's bakkie, took charge of collecting sand for the concrete and mortar mix. A weak battery proved quite problematic, as many times the truck needed a push start, sometimes while loaded with sand.

As Yolandi, Tialise and I went to Kliptown's Pick n Pay to get food supplies, Corobrick very kindly arrived with a delivery of 3000 bricks (with their own transport). The jungle gym, which was stored at Frank Maparas' place overnight, was brought back and in no time, the hall was encumbered with curious and excited children that not only saw the play potential in the playground, but also in the building sand. They remained with us until the end of the day.

We formed several brick lines and passed along it enough bricks to each of the Hall's edges, to ensure that enough bricks are placed close to where the walls will be built.

When lunchtime arrived, we took turns to eat at Frank's, so that we could have a couple of people remain at Slovo Hall to watch over the building materials.

As Frank and Mohau, along with several other community members, set out and marked a straight line for the East wall, they realized that the third column from the north wall sticks out further east than the other columns. To avoid the wall possibly being built further than the roof edge, they decided to use an angle grinder to saw off the bottom of that column, and anchor it into the wall by building around it.

One of the day's highlights was the arrival of the generator, supplied by David. This brought much joy, as a generator proved quite difficult to organise. David said he simply didn't know we needed one, but that he had an unused working generator at his mother's house.

While Yolandi went to collect the brick force and oil for the generator, the boys were assigned the task of breaking the rough screed with mallets, to smoothen the floor surface in the Hall for the walls.

As the day's end came, I left with the hopes that we'll find our building materials all there the next day.

Photos by Clare Hughes

Build week: Day 1

by Yolandi Viljoen

Our first day of build week commenced yesterday. We arrived in Slovo Park at 9:45AM. The JCP students from the University of Pretoria were dropped off at Frank Maparas, not knowing what they have gotten themselves into. Starting off by unpacking the store room, we realise that there is not much we can do, as we have almost no materials. Abby went to Takolias Hyper Hardware, and bought gloves, cement, sheeting, paint brushes and sand paper. We are extremely grateful for our generous discount. On site, the steel windows are being prepared for installation while Tuliza and Clare visit the surrounding homes to collect tools, quite successfully. Tiles on the western and eastern sides were removed to accommodate the seating walls to be built Kiana and I, together with Julia, the lady who will be cooking for us for the week, headed to PicknPay in Kliptown for some basic groceries in order to feed the hard working team. Some of the community members are selflessly helping out, but we are hoping for more volunteers on Wednesday.

On arrival in front of Maparas, Mapara Street

We had a few minor injuries; luckily we came prepared with a mini medi-kit.

Preparations were done but most of the work is postponed as we are waiting for materials, transport and feedback. Tuesday looks promising. Bricks to be delivered at 12:00, sand to be delivered too. Transport was organised to fetch supplies from Rustenburg, and Omar found a jungle gym which we are aiming to fix up and install.

The day ended with a much needed hot plate of Pap and Chicken livers and at 22:00PM we were off to bed.

Photos by Ingmar Büchner

Interactive Design Workshop

by Tuliza Sindi

Model building day re-established our commitment to this endeavour. It was certainly insightful.

We arrived to a few of the block committee members ready and waiting. The presence of six 1:100 scaled Slovo Hall models allowed an easy platform for interaction, providing ease of demonstration and engagement. Models were built of the available building materials, and used on the models as 'building blocks', which proved quite effective. Components were moved around on the model, and many gestures expressed the many clear ideas given by the community members.

Buccs led the meeting, encouraging a flow of ideas and establishing a realistic time-based goal. Jappie proceeded to the Eastern side of the Hall and proposed that it be closed off completely. Buccs then suggested that the roof be raised and extended further west to increase the covered floor space.

Our suggestion to slant the roof enough to catch rainwater was well received, as they mentioned how water is scarce over the weekends due to high levels of laundry being done simultaneously.

There was a clear understanding of time and budgetary constraints from all of the community members present, which made their demands for the Hall very realistic. We were able to plan what could happen in the very near future and were told of the many talents we could have perform in the Hall after our build week.

We met afterwards to discuss the agenda for the next week, considering the homework given to us by Buccs to prepare a proposal document. This is needed by the block committee members to convince community members to each donate R5 towards the project. This need encourages us to finish the design work and documentation hastily, and establishes the documentation needed to raise funding.

The process is well under way!

Business Forum Meeting

by Tuliza Sindi

Our first research day took us to the Business Forum meeting, conducted at a house in the third block from Slovo Hall, on Frank Mapara street. It started off with a prayer by Buccs (Johannes), the secretary, who then gave us the agenda and conducted further proceedings in both English and Sotho. We were taken by surprise when asked to present again. The crowd said nothing after being asked for feedback by us and Buccs. He decided to translate all of our ideas into Sotho, as we sat apologetic that there was a language barrier. The ice finally broke when we were complimented by Mohau for a more confident round of presentations. Our ideas were well received by the Forum, especially that of keeping money in Slovo, and a suggestion was made that we meet only with the Youth Forum leader, the Business Forum leader and Mohau to devise a strategy for the coming build week of Slovo Hall. Mohau informed the Forum of the Health Department's desire to give pneumonia shots, which inspired a possible event that could happen in Slovo Hall.

It seemed like they were full of surprises today, as we were all led into the spaza to be greeted by two girls waiting with warm plates of food and cooldrinks. Although very tasty, it proved to be quite a heavy meal, and it wore us out a bit.

To not disturb the Forum meeting any further, we proceeded to Frank Mapara's tavern, where we finalized Saturday's agenda and got ideas regarding the children's level of involvement and possible fun activities to introduce during the course of our engagements.

We then went to measure all of the available building materials stored in one of the post-boxes. Since we were there, we decided to brainstorm about the Hall as we walked around it, making suggestions and envisioning how those ideas might or might not work, whilst receiving input from the Forum leaders.

Our meeting gave us a clear vision for the next session and got us excited about the workshop planned for Saturday.