Building Tomorrow School Site

With a busy week I am finally catching up, but the week started with three days at the Building Tomorrow site. Building Tomorrow is a nonprofit that raises funds for and builds schools in Uganda. One thing that is definitely true after experiencing the issues in Africa, is that education is truly the best gift anyone can give. Education people helps to reduce poverty, violence, inequality, overpopulation, disease, and more.

Building Tomorrow's 9th school was totally funded by you! The school building and teachers' quarters. For many nonprofits, and very importantly, sustainability is priority and works hand in hand with project affordability. I love how the bricks and mortar are made from the earth materials right on site. The brick making machines were purchased to make interlockin bricks for the school. I also love how the whole local community comes to help build the school, which promotes community bonding. This is a very important point, too, regarding work in other countries. Foreigners who come in a say "We build you a school." Well they build the school but then there is a stigma from villagers where they don't feel attached and are much less likely to use the school because it is something "they" built. So having community involvement is definitely important for the feeling ownership and sustainability, because they are benefitting their own community.

It was awesome the first day we arrived to help because we had piles of bricks that we needed to move from one part of the site to another, so, and we learned this at Shanti Uganda's Birth Center site, we tried to make a chain to pass the bricks down like an assembly line, but we didn't have enough people because where the bricks needed to go was so far. So Terri, one of our group, went and grabbed all the children! They came out as a herd and all lined up, like 35-50 children, and we made a really long assembly line to pass down all the bricks. The kids were so cute and fun, all different ages, helping to build the school they would soon attend and gain an education. One mother actually said she was happy because her children would only have to walk 2 miles to school now instead of 5! Talk about gratitude, what a gift it is to have that appreciation. There is so much we can learn from each other!

So I had three days of hard laborous work, hoeing, carrying bricks, breaking bricks, making bricks, shoveling, wheel barrowing, but I loved it all! I loved doing the physical labor and being in the earth, working with the community, it was so therapeutic for me. I realized how much we are missing, generally as Americans, by sitting at a desk all day. We really are totally separated from nature. I love how Africans mostly live in a small one room mud hut, compared to Americans who have large homes with 5-10 or more rooms, bathrooms (nice though), because the living space for Africans is all around the home, out in nature. They don't stay indoors all day, they sit on the porch, do work outside, play, but just sleep and take shelter inside. I truly feel that kind of living, more with nature, is very important to human health, well-being, and simple enjoyment of life. In many ways, Africans are much healthier than us despite for having so little comparitively and living so simply. Our cultures can definitely learn a lot from each other.