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From the scene – week no.2
26/06/2023
Our report from last week ended with the Monday visit to a quarry, which is 6 km from the future high school. The quarry was formerly used to extract stone and sand for the construction of the railway lines, but is now abandoned. On Monday afternoon, another attempt was made to set up the internet in the nearby town of Kapiri - the SIM cards from last week did not work. Later that evening, this new attempt with a SIM card in a WiFi router did not prove to be the right one either. Our planned Monday online meeting between Kashitu and Prague was therefore not successful. At the Technical university meeting room we watched the screen with a frozen picture of Pája for a while and then talked only among ourselves and communicated with the Kashitu team via text messages with a few minutes long delay. Pája, Peter and Matěj also managed to visit the community solar mill that afternoon, where white corn is ground into flour, which the locals use to make nshima - a traditional Zambian side dish.
On Tuesday, right after breakfast, it was time to lay out the siteplan of our first high school building. The laying out didn't stop there though, as Peter started helping the locals to lay out an outdoor bathroom that the locals want to build for our team. After lunch, Pája, Petr and Matěj drove to Kapiri again to check out the prices of materials and tools at the local hardware stores. These trips are organized in order to draw up a logistical plan of what to buy where and when, so that we can manage everything as efficiently as possible and not drive unnecessary kilometres.
Coincidentally, in Kapiri we also visited a secondary school where the same principle was used for construction as on our project - it is built with unburnt bricks. We will certainly write more soon about this beautiful example, which shows that this technology has proven itself elsewhere.
On Wednesday 21.6. early in the morning Matěj, Pája and Petr left from Kashitu to Lusaka. The first stop was a car repair shop, where an acute radiator replacement took a lot of time and we arrived in Lusaka late in the afternoon. And why did we go there? In the evening there was an official meeting with the team in Prague waiting for Pája, Petr and Matěj - a replacement for the unsuccessful one on Monday. The next day they got up early to take the car to the repair shop to go through a complex check up and leave it there until Saturday. The afternoon was followed by a meeting at the Czech Embassy in Lusaka with Ambassador Pavel Procházka and diplomat Václav Kuželka. Our three representatives presented to them our plans and the whole project of building a secondary school - what it will look like, how it will be done, they consulted the clearance process of our brick presses and how the embassy could help the project, and they also debated local politics and issues of African countries. As a result, the embassy has been very nice, accommodating and trying to ease our bureaucratic difficulties in Zambia. This is great news, thank you!
Thursday was quieter for most of the team. Matěj had a temperature and Pája had been fighting a cold for ten days, so they took a day off and rested. Meanwhile, Petr went to check prices of tools in different stores. Then on Saturday they made a shopping list of building materials and tools together and also a menu, according to which Justin, the cook who will take care of us and our stomachs during our time in Kashitu, will cook for us. On Sunday, it was finally time to go to the car repair shop and get the last important paperwork for the car's ownership transfer. We also got a special cover for the body of the car that doubles as a roof, which now gives us more room to carry our luggage and tools, and makes it safer for all the cargo as well. Now to get a trailer...