Day 3

Today was another full day in Swaziland. We left the guest house by 8am and we stayed at the job site until the sun made us quit for the day.  Our goal was to start the construction of our pit latrine toilets today.  We are building them out of used plastic bottles to save them from being burned & polluting the atmosphere. It also saves us money in building materials.  We were able to lay all 750 bottles in one day!  At the beginning of the day, we tamped the dirt, set a course of concrete blocks as a foundation, and filled the concrete blocks with mortar.  The team quickly realized that mixing mortar by hand was laborious work.  Using just shovels, Brendan, Beth, Mary and Jose mixed river sand, cement and water in a large pile, while Annie and Kylie hand-pumped water from the bore hole and carried it up the hill by wheel barrow.  By noon, the team had a good rhythm and the wall was beginning to take shape. 

Unfortunately, just as the sun was setting & darkness was approaching (no light at all except the moon in rural Malindza Village), the team ran out of bottles and the wall was only half of the height as planned.  We delivered 5 emergency meal packs to children living in granny-headed homes and then called it a day.  On the way home, we stopped by Beished’s homestead to see if there were any additional bottles in the chicken coup, where the other bottles had previously been stored.  Brendan graciously volunteered to army crawl into the dark chicken coup to retrieve any bottles that may have been previously missed.  He found enough bottles to fill another trash bag! The finding of more bottles is just what the team needed at the end of a long day!  Tomorrow, we will be leaving the guest house by 6am to go to on safari in the morning, then we will head back to our wall to see what further progress we can be made with our newly collected water bottles.  The team is tired, and muscles in my body ache that I didn’t even know I had. Did you know that a lack of toilets is a leading cause of death among youth in developing countries?  That’s keeping me going…and the ibuprofen!