Days 13 and 14: New Kids in Town

The days here aren't as hot as you would think. The wet season is just ending and the hills next to the village are usually covered in this rolling fog. It doesn't rain too much, well it drizzles a bit, but it's not too sunny. The breeze is nice though. So today we continued with making sure the masons were plastering the inside of the pits and we were looking forward to seeing the second team today!

Sammy went to Accra to pick them up, but when we called him to check on how things were, he told us that their flight as cancelled and that they were stuck in Morocco. Plus, their bags had not made it on the flight. We didn't want to believe him at first because he likes playing jokes like this, but when he came back to the room and we didn't see anyone with him, we considered he might have been telling the truth. Then Suraj, Anjali, and Ben burst through the door and then we're like oh Sammy, you got us didn't you. The only part of his story that was true was that their bags actually had not made it on the flight and they were going to come two days later.

So we all visited sites together and tonight we ate at Fotobi and had a great time, although a few of us have been feeling slight headaches and fevers but nothing a little Cipro can't cure. And instead of Fanta, some of us had Alvaro, which is this nice non-alcoholic carbonated beverage with several fruit flavors to choose from, and we got Passion Fruit. Def a tasty drink.
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Mostly today we hung around Kwasi-doi to make sure the substructure was getting completed. Everyone helped out, whether it was shoveling, mixing mortar, carrying blocks, anything! Anjali was learning a lot of Twi from the kids, and I had learned to count from 1-10 in Twi as well. I also taught John Kwaye how to count from 1-5 in Chinese and then later taught him 6-10 but he said that was too hard. Then later, we walked to the site in Western Obodan, around a 20 minute walk from Kwasi-doi, but 2 minutes away from where we were staying, and we saw that they had laid the wooden boards on the substructure, in preparation for pouring the floor slab.

Then we noticed that they were designing it per the pilot latrine we implemented last summer, which was neither gender-divided nor side pit access. So we had to sit down and talk about which design would be better, and of course we knew it would be gender-divided but we had to clarify where the entrance doors were and where the pit access doors (where you dig out the solid waste) were. We ended up getting it figured out thanks to Sammy!

Tonight most of us went to Nsawam, and logged on to the internetz. But nobody updated the blog. Psh.

Night,
Team 1 and Team 2

Day 13 pics (Day 14 pics start at the picture with Ben, Anjali, the kids, and the pit):