With Emelie travelling home, we (Linda and David) had one last week to spend at the project site. During the week we had time to finalise some of the planning work from the previous weeks: outlining the budget, collecting proforma invoices, and checking the material at the supplier sites.

Going over the plumbing drawings, one last issue we had to think about was how the heavy galvanised pipes were to be mounted to the ring beam, as well as to the facades. On the Baobab house the pipes had simply been put on top of the ring beam, but for the children’s centre this would have to be solved in a different way.

Together with Caroline and Maxi we therefore went to Arusha to enquire about pipe mounting solutions at a few metal industries. We discussed and sketched quite a few different solutions, but finally ended up with a preferred solution (considering construction and budget), which we added to the planned plumbing budget.

Discussing how to mount the pipes to the building facades

In addition to this we also spent some time at a sisal wood retailer, to understand how much wood would be needed for the construction. We realized that the irregular shape of the sisal wood would only enable us to use approximately 2.5 m of each bought pole as the upper part is naturally crooked. Consequently, we had to adjust the sisal pole budget. We also discussed ways of creating an inspection door within the sisal wood façade, to allow for roof inspection in the children’s centre.

At the sisal wood retailer

Apart from planning and budgeting, we had some time to do some hands-on work on our own: painting the steel shoes of the roof. The trusses of the roof were mounted onto the ring beam with steel shoes, which were produced on demand out of an untreated steel plate. Therefore, the steel shoes had to be painted with red oxide paint in order to protect them from environmental degradation. So with some paint left over from previous volunteers, and with fresh thinner bought from Arusha, we started to climb up and down the children’s centre, to paint all steel shoes. With four houses, and at least two applications needed, there was quite some painting work to be done!

Painting the steel shoes

With planning and painting all done, we had reached our final day at the project site. After that, we couldn’t leave Tanzania without scaling the beautiful Mt. Kilimanjaro! After a successful trek, we headed back home, full of wonderful memories from beautiful Tanzania and the wonderful Econef site!

Bye bye Baobab!

Linda and David