#10 – A trip to town for clothes and supplies

My brother-in-law Jim did not get his luggage for several days, ergo, he made a shopping trip to town.

Here is the local bar and hotel:

And here is a high-rise going up:

#9 – Back on the grid!

Lynne is back in touch with us (as you can see from new posts around here), and she truly is at the end of the earth! Someone stole a portion of the phone and power cables, so they did not have electricity for a day and a half, no water for a day, no hot water for another day and no internet for several days. Her phone will not accept a local sim card, and her computer may have completely fried.

Lynne says that the workers are very welcoming and have taught her how to use lots of non-power tools.  The building goes well.  They do a lot of chiseling and mixing of cement and mortar (more on that soon), and the people in charge are surprisingly open to suggestions and recommendations.  Lynne suggested putting in a few windows in one of the rooms, and this is the view from there now:

They haven’t seen a great deal of what we would consider to be typical Africa wildlife.  Poaching is a huge problem in Africa, and hunters will kill elephants and rhinos just for their tusks.  As a result, most of the wildlife is getting rounded up and gathered into parks for their protection.  They plan to go to such a park soon, but so far Lynne has seen lots of termites, mosquitos, pigs, donkeys and dogs.

Lynne thanks everyone for their comments, messages, thoughts and prayers.  She is so happy to be able to keep in touch and show the world what life is like in Gulu, Uganda.  Isn’t technology amazing?

#8 – Where we work

From Lynne:

The house we are working on requires the most manual of manual labor.

This is the building we have been constructing.

There is no electric on site, and the methods are labor intensive and sometimes backbreaking. We mixed the concrete with a shaker (see below)—one shovel of cement, one shovel of coarse sand, one shovel of fine sand—shake, shake, shake.

Jim is a hard worker!

Practically the whole house is made out of this stuff including wall and ceiling finishes.  Channels for boxes and conduit are chiseled out after bricks are laid. Jim and I spent a whole week just on that. What I wouldn’t have given for a power chisel!