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.
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!
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.
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| Dr. Halek demonstrating how to take a distance measurement with the total station |
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| Sonya mastering the leveling instrument |
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!
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