Week #35 A tour of the construction site

After eight months of preparation we have finally broken ground on the new campus!
Here is an architectural representation of the new school.

Site preparations include clearing and grubbing the land and then bringing in several thousand cubic meters of gravel (here red laterite).

In Mali you don't bring in a job trailer on a tractor trailer truck.... instead you build a "temporary" concrete block building.... making all the blocks by hand on-site first!


This engineering drawings shows the layout of the walls in the main school building.

Due to the poor soils we must excavate over 800 8-foot deep holes for the column footings. All of these holes will be dug by hand in extremely hard soils.

There are no concrete batch plants in Mali so all concrete is mixed on site. Crushed stone is not created by mechanical crushers, but rather by fleets of workers crushing BY HAND!

The aggregate and loading it into the dump trucks by hand! Needless to say, standing atop one of the 50 odd dump truck loads of stone that we have stock piled at the site is very humbling!

We recently completed the drilled well for the school's onsite water supply. Here workers prepare the base of a temporary water tower that will supply water for the massive quantities of concrete that will be mixed at the site.