T minus 2 days!

Hello friends,
We're still working hard to prepare for our trip, which is coming up fast! I'll give you a brief update.
On Wednesday night, we met with the education team to eat a delicious dinner, listen to country music, and finish our educational materials. The latter mostly involved cutting and gluing pieces of felt for our water cycle lesson. Here we all are (minus Andy):

The education team has put together several lesson plans that are fun for kids of different ages. These include lessons in the water cycle, water and energy conservation, filtering water, watersheds, nutrition, and others. They've been preparing fun activities to go with these lessons and teaching the travel team how to teach the lessons.
On Thursday, Andy and I went to Denver to meet with some members of OZ Architecture and Tetra Tech who helped create the city of Kigali master plan a few years ago. These guys knew the city like the back of their hands and gave us a ton of great information and contacts. We chatted for a couple of hours about how to create community, the status of the water and wastewater treatment infrastructure, who to contact for geotechnical services, the feasibility of using biogas, and much more.
Later that day, we met up with BJ to practice our cookstove testing for the CVK portion of the trip. When we were there in January, we noticed that the cookstoves that are used most frequently were deteriorating rather dramatically... Not all of the cooks and kids use the stoves properly, which also leads to damage. One of our goals on this trip is to do a few tests on the stoves and compare the results with those done on the new stoves when they were first installed. BJ has been heading up this part of the maintenance by getting the protocols for the tests, buying all of the materials, and coordinating with the lab to get practice materials.
The boiling tests involved timing how long it takes to boil a pot of water, and weighing fuel before and after the test--luckily we had some heavy-duty fireproof gloves to beat out the fire from the wood before weighing the pieces.

                                    Andy took notes while I tried to keep the fire going. Tobi the happy doggie is in the background.

We finished the day with a meeting at Boulder Cafe with one of our mentors, Mark Cormier. Mark's day job involves designing schools for Colorado, so he's excited to help us as much as possible when we get back in August and begin finalizing the design of the school for the ROP.

Yesterday, after a travel card fiasco that involved a lot of frantic phone calls and running around Denver, the whole travel team met for another dinner (we eat a lot!) and to distribute all of our gear. With the camera equipment, stuff for friends in Rwanda, maintenance and education materials, we have a lot to bring on this trip! 

Just a few more tasks remain, and then we'll be off! We'll write again from Kigali, where we're all arriving at different times. 

Stay in touch!!

Sonya

Gearing Up for the Summer Trip!

Muraho Friends!

It's almost time for our travelers to embark on this summer's Rwandan adventures.  In order to make our time in Rwanda as meaningful as possible, we have been holding training workshops to learn the skills that we'll use for our projects.

This Saturday, several members of our travel team met with Dr. Milan Halek from CU's Civil Engineering Dept. to learn the art of land surveying.  It turns out that our professional mentor Steve had taken Dr. Halek's surveying class back in the 70s and still managed to recall more about surveying fundamentals than most of us with more recent experience.  We learned how to use a leveling instrument and a total station, how to level a tripod, and how to correctly read the height markings on a surveying rod.  We were also reminded that trigonometry is actually still important, and is in fact the friend of the lazy surveyor. 

Dr. Halek demonstrating how to take a distance measurement with the total station

Sonya mastering the leveling instrument

The goal of the workshop was for us to learn how to make a topographical map of the Rwandan Orphans Project's new land, on which we are planning to build a school.  Once a topo map has been created, we can start figuring out a site plan for the new land, and get started on picking an appropriate location for the school building. 

Big pre-travel preparations are also underway with our team's extensive documentary film training.  We have been working with Jeff Larson and colleagues at In the Telling, a Boulder based film and media consulting business, to come up with a video instruction curriculum for EWB-USA.  The idea is that we will film ourselves planning and executing various activities during the Rwandan Orphans Project assessment trip to create a sort of How-To guide to building construction.  All of this means that we get to learn to use this super-professional-looking video camera:

Tomorrow, the travel team will practice filming interviews,  surveying some land, and filming interviews while surveying.  It will be good practice for a typical day once we get to Kigali.

We will keep you posted on our trip as our embarkation date grows nearer and nearer!  A little more than a week from now, you'll be seeing pictures from Rwanda!