Blog from Doumandzou
Wrapping up, not quite
Today was the last full day for Henk, Mary and John. We had a few personal things to do before we left. Nguema took us to see the well that Robert uncovered in 1964 and that still supplies a needed source of clean water to the village. We had a few last minute purchases of souvenirs to bring home.
We were all set to find a car to start our journey to Libreville, when we learned that Bob and Gaston decided to drive out to Doumandzou to check on progress and see what remained to be done. They arrived yesterday afternoon to great celebration as they brought some resupplies as well. Bob was so happy to see the upgraded school he drove around the soccer field in his car blasting his horn.
They did a quick inspection on the school and houses while we finished painting the primer on all the windows. Drew and Henk had reinforced the center beams in the school.
Today we had two meetings, one to discuss work progress and the other in the corps de garde to talk about what work remained to be done and the inauguration with the attendance hopefully of the US Ambassador (to great applause). Gaston thanked the village for all they had done to receive us so well. John also thanked everyone saying he was happy that so much had been accomplished with the help of so many people but sad to be leaving his new friends with work still to be done. Gaston pointed out Drew and Claire would stay and continue to work.
Afterwards we took pictures and had a nice big meal, with more than a few beers.
Photos below are of today’s work meeting and of the school as three of us are leaving it, with roof placed on one of the teachers’ houses and handles on the doors of the school. The last photo is of Drew with his contraption to place the beam securely on the center of the roof.
Drew will continue to send updates over the next few weeks to the blog, and we have a couple others on water and children that we can send after we leave.
Adieu nos amis de Doumandzou.
We’re not 25 anymore
Not even 45. But after a few weeks of sometimes back-breaking work, we’re not as exhausted or weary as we were the first week.
Of the five of us here there’s really only one of us with any construction experience. What that means is the real skill work (masonry, carpentry) is being done by our foreman, Christian, his colleagues Nico and Yannick or the guardian of the house where we’re staying, Nguema. A lot of the hard muscle work is done by the young men from the village.
So, you might ask, what is it exactly that we are doing. Quite a bit actually and quite a bit varied. We have never been idle, working six days a week. We started out doing a lot of demolition, scraping and cleaning the old wood that could be salvaged. Mary spent a lot of time treating the new wood with preservative, and we have also done carpentry, replacing rotted beams and putting up the vertical planks. There’s been more than our fair share of organizing the work site, moving around and cleaning the bricks and lumber, and a little clearing.
We have made a lot of progress so far but it didn’t take us long to realize just how dependent we are on our hosts to be able to see the progress we’ve been making. Truly a community effort.
Below are Clair and Mary painting window blocks at the rear end of the school, just behind Nico who is laying them. Also, my gloves after three weeks of work are exhibit A that we have actually been pitching in.
Il faut profiter
I try not to post everyday, but today we had some excitement. We learned in the morning that a bulldozer that belonged to the nearby Chinese logging company would be coming through the village. We heard the magic words in the village “il faut profiter” – You must take advantage. There’s a lot of village life, it seems, wrapped up in those words, taking advantage of opportunities that come up.
Our opportunity today was a bulldozer to push back the forest behind the school and teachers houses. Some great landscaping
About 50 feet behind the teachers houses, a small tin fence appeared. It turned out it had a roof, and looked like a shed. The dozer cleaned out in front of it, and it turns out to have been a three stall latrine built in 1965 by the Peace Corps school construction group. Still standing.
We’re painting!
We passed a threshold yesterday and started putting the primer on the window blocks.
All the windows on the front facade are in, and we need just a couple of more vertical wooden planks to close up the school. The facia boards are up on the front as well. I don’t want to jinx anything, but it looks like we may finish on time.
Tonight, Henk gave out European soccer jerseys to the four young village men who have been helping us. Since Nico once told us he wanted to go to Miami, he got a shirt with Miami Beach on it. Smiles all around.
Sorry about the comments that readers have not been able to read. Try clicking on the blog post that will send you to a different page with the individual post and the comments at the bottom of the post. Lets hope that works.
Cell phones
| If you ask for someone’s contact information, you will be given a cell phone number. If you buy a ticket on the train, you will be asked for your cell phone number. Cell phones are everywhere and unlike New England there is no attempt to disguise a tower in the form of a tree or within a church steeple. And it’s easy to understand. The infrastructure you need to install is minimal. We saw towers with a fence around the base which included solar panels for power. Bingo, no transmission cables to install and maintain, no houses to wire.Most phones that we saw in the village were your basic non-smart phone variety. You can talk, you can text, you can take pictures, you can play music. The young guys working on the school would have their phones and music would be blaring out. I countered with by bluetooth speaker playing Santana, Grateful Dead and Canned Heat.
The phones are also a method of transfering money. It is so easy to walk into tiny places either in villages, towns or cities and hand bills to the merchant (the same one selling the soap or the mattress or the drinks) and then you get a message on you phone that your data has been increased or you have a certain sum. Henri, the guy we met in Okandja, was spending a lot of time making sure a message got through to his brother in Cameroun, transfering money to him. He had to try several times but eventually it did go through. The drawback–every silver lining has a cloud–is that I haven’t seen cell phone ediquette developed, or been enforced. Taking while driving, answering the phone while inspecting travel documents, or answering and then talking on the phone in the middle of a meeting is commonplace. But it did allow me to speak with Bernadette, our former cook in Lekila, when I was in the village. Her sister, Ambrosine, was talking with me as we were walking around the village and then hands me her phone and says it’s Bernadette calling from Libreville. All I could do is smile. (Drew Howard) |
Teachers’ houses
Next to the school were two structures, both abandoned to the workings of nature. One was a single family house, and the other had two residences. These were also built in 1965 with the original school to house three teachers and their families.
It’s unclear when the last time anyone inhabited these structures, but they were being taken over by the forest, parts of them held up by the vines that grew through them.
Our first priority all along had been the school but we thought that with just a bit more fund-raising we could tackle these houses, that were such an eyesore in the middle of the village. We had forgotten but the word for ugly here is “villain.” These houses were called villain.
Underneath the rot and rubble, though, we found an amazingly sturdy structure, that has impressed the local builders. Some of the wood is incredibly strong and immovably attached to the concrete. Certain design elements went into the entrances to make them more livable.
We realize how important it was to include these houses in the overall project, for the aesthetics of the upgrade, but also as a way to help attract those responsible for the schooling in the other building.
Photos below are before and now, and of David who climbed on one of the roofless structures to cut the vines with his machete. Soon will come an “after” photo when they are completed.
Live from Doumandzou
It’s Saturday night.
Some days work is slow and small. Others, progress is visible from hundreds of meters away. We had both kinds of days this week. But, today was one of the latter.
Christian, our chef, arrived yesterday with the last order of wood, and then we took advantage of the truck to get our last load of sand, at a stream just a couple of kilometers from the village.
With all the materials on hand, the worksite turned into a six-ring circus of activity today. The biggest step forward was the laying of the “cloistered” cement block windows in two of the classrooms. At the same time, a trench was dug in front of the school for the new terrace to catch the water off the roof and save the school’s foundation. The teachers’ houses had been cleared and cleaned of all the encroaching forest, and we have started rebuilding the roof structures. The new wood was treated, and window blocks were cleaned up, readied for placement. We probably had 16 people working at the site today.
Two if those 16 were Drew and Claire who arrived earlier in the week. Bienvenue.
Photos below are of Christian laying the windows; of Nico in front of the terrace/trench and of Drew, Christian and the truck driver getting sand “en brousse.”
We are not far from starting to paint. Now that’s enough excitement got a Saturday night.
We have received some terrific comments, but to see them all, you’ll have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page, after all the posts.
Archaeology
Our friend Cliff who was a construction volunteer in the Peace Corps and has built several houses (including helping rehab our house in Pittsfield) would mark his name somewhere in the inner structure of the building, a sign for future generations.
So, we half expected to find some traces of the original builders as we have been taking apart the school and teachers’ houses. After working in one of the classrooms, taking down the rotten beams, scraping and brushing the solid ones, making bricks, we would pause and stare at the walls, out the windows, catching our breath in the heat of the day.
And then we saw it, right where the blackboard had been hung. The numbers 1, 9, 6, 5, and the letters JA and then bigger letters PD.
JA is of course the man who has approached near legendary status in the village, Jerry Anderson, the team leader of the group in 1965 that built the school. Near legend because we hear his name often, and not just in connection with the school. Several people have told us he drilled a hole in a rock and found a source of clean water, that continues to run. There he was, behind the blackboard, reaching across the 50 years to send us a message.
We are not sure what the PD stands for so we welcome any input from the earlier group of volunteers.
The first picture is of Arcel and Jean-Baptiste making bricks in the classroom. Hope you all can make out 1965, JA and PD in the next photo.
We remember Dan.
Food
We could write a book about what we’re eating, how we’re eating, when we’re eating. Our book would have a lot of pictures but unfortunately we haven’t taken a lot.
First, and foremost the kindness of strangers. Our hosts where we are staying and the people who look after their house have been extraordinarily generous preparing meals that have appeared when we come back from work. The town elder, Papa Ekabane, and his joyous wife Esperanze (where Bob and Claire and Drew are staying) have regularly put on Thanksgiving type meals with fish, antelope, chicken and hedgehog type game. But it’s the various preparations of cassava and corn that our really wonderful. Our favorites might be fish and manioc leaves or fish and another leaf called fornol or a corn porridge.
People come to the house or to the worksite and drop off pineapples or papaya, plaintain and bananas. In season now are atangas, a small, avocado type fruit that is quickly boiled, salted and great with beer. There was one woman who saw us out walking and called us over to her very humble home to give us a dish she had prepared.
Second, we have a regimen of food we brought with us which is pretty boring but fills us up and is relatively easy to prepare. This includes rice and canned lentils, tomatoes and fish. Breakfast is routine, consisting of oatmeal, bread/ when find it, fruit, coffee and juice. Our Peace Corps will be happy to remember the Nescafé and lait sucre and canned sardines and mackerel continue as staples.
The photos below are of a meal at Papa Ekabane’s with Gaston, Bob, Mary and Henk. The other is Gabon meets France, baguettes and atangas.
Temporary school
January seemed like an ideal time to come work on the school because it’s the short dry season in Gabon. No rain. However, we also worried that we would be interrupting classes in session. Some of us vaguely remember a loose calendar with students drifting back slowly. We knew we couldn’t be working on the school at the same time that students were in the classes.
What we didn’t count on was an enterprising primary school teacher by the name of Roland. On Monday, he returned from the provincial capital where he had gone to submit the results of the first term.
The village had identified an unfinished building for his classes during construction. By Tuesday morning he had cut the tall grass in front and around the building, moved the blackboards and school bell, and had the students carry the heavy desks to the temporary school. He divided the students into morning and afternoon sessions.
When we stopped by Wednesday afternoon, he was in the middle of a lesson about telling time using a clock with hands, with a picture he had drawn on the blackboard.
Students missed one day of class.
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Encore de la Paix 