Muraho
friends, colleagues, family members, partners, Kagame intelligence-gathering internet
trollers, and random stumblers!
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| A last view of Rwanda |
This is the last
and long-awaited installment of the summer 2012 travel blog. Our band of intrepid adventurers left you
last as we were closing out the final days of our time in Kigali. We ended our last night of the trip over
dinner and a heated game of Scattergories with Sean and Jenny…the game ending
in a bombastic display of head-to-head word play between Jenny and I (I am
pretty confident that Jenny won but am content with this, as she is a
professionally trained journalist and I am but a number crunching engineer.)
In project
news, our post-assessment trip 522 and post-monitoring trip 531 documents got
submitted on time to EWB at approximately 5:31am, after the team had unwisely
taken time out of our feverish writing trance for another game of
Scattergories. The documents were
reviewed by EWB-USA, and we had a hugely successful conference call with
Tiffany Martindale, our EWB-USA project manager a few days after returning to
the states. EWB-USA thought both
documents were of superior quality, and we are happy to report that we are
officially cleared to move forward with preparing for the implementation phase of
the ROP school project. (This involves a
thorough assessment of building options, materials, and monitoring plans due in
mid-August which Kyle, Jacob, and Matt are working on already, followed by a
preliminary design report and a final design report due in September and
October respectively.) We also have to
raise the funds, which Emily, Andrew, Jordan, Andy, and others are already
starting to tackle.
To recap our
time and highlight our accomplishments this summer, I would like to use a
little something I call a bulleted list of AWESOME PRODUCTIVITY:
- Forged good relationship with ROP partners and established responsibilities and expectations for our partnership
- Completed preliminary land survey of future school site and made cool topographical map
- Completed geotechnical survey of future school site
- Established relationship with Kigali One Stop Center and determined requirements for permitting new building construction
- Signed community agreements with Sector and Umudugudu leaders ensuring volunteer labor for the school project and community support
- Formed relationship with Kigali Rotary Club in order to partner in finding funding and support for the school project
- Gathered information on cost and availability of building materials for more accurate future budget estimates
- Established contact with EWSA, KIST, and CITT to gather information about energy, water, and sanitation practices, costs, and availability
- Exceled at Scattergories, fed milk to stray cats, haggled with moto drivers in Kinyarwanda, and otherwise increased personal and cumulative team awesomeness
As the beginning
of fall semester closes in, our team has a lot of hard work and a lot of fun
bonding times ahead of us. We are
looking forward to a pre-semester team barbeque, two pre-semester document
submissions, and a lot of coffee-laden early morning conference calls to
Rwanda. THANK YOU to everyone who
enjoyed reading our blog this summer! We
appreciate your support and are excited to share more new project developments
with you soon!
Because there were not enough pictures in this blog post, I would like to finish with an illustrated example round of Scattergories. The selected letter is "C":
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| "crouch in a hole" |
2. Cutest animals in Rwanda
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| "cows" |
3. Something you can purchase at this shop:
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| "cell phone cards" or "cheese in a can" are acceptable answers and both give you a score of +2 |
4. Ways the travel team displays affection
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| "comical gymnastic feats" |
5. Things that float in water
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| "carafe of air" |
