Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Our last day at Gituamba

Today marked our last day of construction activity. Since we have an early flight from Nairobi to Qatar and then home, we need to spend tomorrow night in Nairobi. We'll make the four hour trip tomorrow with a few fun stops on the way, including the Amani Ya Juu women's empowerment gift shop and the Rothschild Giraffe center.  

Today, we had activities going on on several fronts. We had individuals spending time in the school classrooms reading to the children and others out on the fields playing games with them. Some final painting work happened on school windows, and painting of windows and and filling in of gable panels was done on the church building. This church building to me has been one of the most dramatic changes in this community. Here are pictures of the church building (inside and out) that existed on this site last year when we went to Gituamba. 




Last year, you can just see the steel and stone for the new church being constructed. Although I don't have a good side view of the church now, you can get a good idea from these pictures of the inside and the front. And the pictures of today's concrete work show the area at the rear of the church.  This will become a storeroom and pastor's office. What a great transformation and fantastic facility for this community! 





We had a large portion of the team working on pouring the 26' x 20' concrete pad on he back of the church. This was an opportunity for us through SWOK to hire some of the community residents to do the concrete finishing work. We had purchased a concrete mixer last year for the concrete work on the dining hall, and we were able to use it for this job. It has also been used extensively this past year for other concrete projects. We had a full crew of people filling and hauling buckets of sand, stone, water and cement to make this job happen. We had a tired, dusty and dirty crew by the end of the day, but everyone had a great feeling of accomplishment for all the work that was achieved and relationships that were reestablished in this great community. We look forward to going back again next year!

















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