Rice Milling Machine Project

My village had been given a large sum of money from a development agency via the World Bank.  Some of the money was already before I arrived in my village on an ox art and two oxen.  I began to help them on a water project that would convert a bore hole with one hand pump to a bore hole with a large tank and generator and taps or faucet for the villagers to use.  The project was well under way until they committee that reviews the project said the village would have to contribute about 70K Dalasis.  The village could not come up with that much money so the project was canceled. 

The village then decided they wanted to spend their money on a tractor.  When they called the committee about the possibility of buying a tractor they said no, not enough money was available.  Finally the village decided they wanted a rice milling machine.  The committed approved the machine and the building of a cement block building to house the machine.

A few weeks ago we started building the blocks out of cement.  It is interesting the first thing is you have to mix 2 wheel barrows of sand to one back of cement. 

Notice the man with his hands on his hips?? And the sweet winter hat? That’s my host father supervising

Getting sand with my host father supervising

Mixing the sand and cement

remixing the cement and waiting for a block mold

 You then shovel the cement mixture into a mold and drop it a couple times to compress the cement and then start stacking them on ground

making blocks

You get about 45 blocks from one mixture of sand and cement.

Measuring for the foundation

Then a few days later we had to measure and start digging the foundation.  The foundation was 18cm deep and one block wide.  The building will have a foot print of 6m X 5m



Digging the foundation with the usal supervisor



Mixing Mortar

Transporting blocks by donkey cart

Then we start building the actual building.  

  

Walls going up via Gambian

scaffolding