new skills

So I'm still working on building my house, and I'm still living in a shipping container. Work has been delayed a bit since I had to go to Kampala with my counterpart so we could talk with the lady who has been the operations manager but is going back to Scotland then to Alaska for a while. They wanted us to go over projects and things in the works before she left. We have a life jacket manufacturing project going in the village I'm living in, so I've been doing a little with that; giving advice, a little oversight, creating a youth size life jacket design, and testing it. I've also been builder/contractor/supervisor/laborer on my house. I've never built a mud house before, and the volunteers working on it haven't either, but we are learning by asking questions from other people, discussing what might work, and trying things out. The guys are getting some good practice and experience in construction. You can see some pictures of the house by clicking on them on the right. We don't have much more to do. Just the finish coats of mud (which is mixed with cow dung to make it harder and more weather resistant), pouring the concrete floor, hanging the ceiling of papyrus mats, and moving in. Not that I have any furniture to move in yet. We also are almost done with the latrine. We just need to build the superstructure over the pit. I'm making gutters for the roof, also, so I can harvest rain water. It should help with the trips to the borehole 4 kilometers away. I fixed the borehole in my village that had been broken for 3 years, but there's very little water from it, as it's very shallow. It does help to supply some water, though. The local chairman had been collecting money for maintenance of the borehole, and after it broke he said that he had contacted a guy trained in repairing the handpump and he had said it wasn't fixable. After asking the chairman a few questions, I learned that he hadn't actually contacted anyone about fixing it. The money for maintenance has "disappeared" as they say. I don't know anything about borehole pumps, but I borrowed a couple wrenches from the one guy in the village with an extremely limited set of tools, and took a look at the pump. There became quite a crowd gathered to see what the muzungu (or mundo as some of them say in their local language) was doing with their old broken borehole. In 15 minutes I had screwed the rod back together that had come apart and water was being pumped again. I showed a guy how to take the cover off and what things looked like inside so maybe if there's a problem again, they can at least take a look at it.