Our second Gituamba workday

We returned to Gituamba today for our second construction workday. The difference this time was that school was in session, so there were 500+ kids there. When we drove onto the school grounds this morning, we felt like a ship arriving in the movie “Hawaii”. We were mobbed as if we were rockstars. The kids really crave the attention and look forward to hanging out with all of us, from the young team members to us old people. We had close to 15 SWOK students with us today. When they weren’t in classes, the kids were hanging in the windows and anywhere that our team members and SWOK kids were actively working. We spent a lot of time playing with the kids, including passing out stickers and putting glitter on faces and arms and hands and blowing bubbles and just generally spending time with them. 

We had work going on in the dining hall, repainting all of the walls, window frames being painted again, new steel framing and wood panels being put up as sound insulation above the walls to isolate noise between classrooms, seatbacks and seat surfaces were being installed on chair frames and were being second coated with varnish immediately after they were put together. Some of our team were sorting and distributing dresses and shorts, scarves, and underwear. A lot of new backpacks were distributed to kids as well. One of the objectives was to make sure that every child had something new to take home. It was a great day with a lot of work accomplished, and we all returned back to our base exhausted. 

Tomorrow will be our final day of water filter, training and distribution and vision clinic. We will need to run a somewhat reduced vision clinic because we are running low on supplies of readers and are completely out of sunglasses. But we will be able to do eye exams and refractions and make prescription glasses.