7 September 2008

As a follow up to Ashlee’s letter about the language she said that another one she is having trouble with is tomorrow = yesterday. How do you figure out when you are doing something when there is no difference between yesterday and tomorrow? Curious. Ashlee asked that we send gum in their care packages because what they have tastes terrible! They now have an internet phone and can receive emails, but still can only respond when they are at the provincial house.

Andy and I are going to work on a Western house design for the village. They are going to start raising and processing pine trees in the region and he would like to show them how to build a wood framed house. This would help to reduce the amount of wood needed for construction as currently it takes a lot of wood to burn to fire the bricks that they use to build. There will be challenges as they do not have the other traditional building materials that we have including treated lumber for sill plates, house wrap and exterior sheathing that we use to protect the wood from rotting. A girl from my office, Charmalee, who is from Sri Lanka, has some experience in this type of work and she and I are teaming up to design and detail a house for them. Andy said that getting a set of metric blueprints would mean the world to the village. He has been working with a local contractor on the bridge projects and with Andy’s extensive construction experience he feels that he could guide them through the construction process. I have already been thinking up ways to make that process smoother by maybe laminating the plans as they do not have a way to reproduce them. We are starting this week to research construction techniques that may be applicable. Maybe by the time we go the Zambia next spring they will be underway.