The 2 large rectangles on either side of the door in the new library wall will be filled with at steel grill to keep the computers secure.  The welder doing the work is wrapping 1/2" steel rod around a pipe to create coils that will later be cut into circles for the grill.



The road we take into Kisumu is lined with street vendors.  This particular area sells shoes which you can see displayed on the wall in the background.



This is Tracy, one of our students from Turkana.  She has been very helpful in identifying Turkana people and places in pictures taken by Wilma Wilcox.



This is Simon, one of our students from Uganda.  He has turned out to be very good at book repair.  He has great patience, fine motor skills, and attention to detail.  He is here mending torn pages.



The poles are heavy enough that it is a 3 man job to position them and get them plum.  Two people have to lift it up while the third person maneuvers it in the bottom of the hole.  Unfortunately, the business manager took one of Jim's workers today without telling him, so we wasted a lot of time trying to find things to keep busy.  About 4:00 Jim couldn't stand it any more and he went and asked Donna to be the third person.  Immediately several of her student library workers volunteered to help, including Rosina, a female student from Samburu.

The life of a librarian in Kenya has some surprises.  A brilliant idea of Fred's is to keep used glasses and then the students can look for ones that will help them read the computer screens, read closer, or see the board.  They get to keep them and certainly are a hit.  Being an optician is quite an interesting added librarian's service.



Here is our new computer library wall being varnished.  A librarian also finds many uses for old newspapers such as protecting the floor or washing the windows with them.



A personal joy was to share our duplicate magazines with all of the students.  We have 72 students here these past 3 weeks.  I asked the student representatives for each class to come and each got 3 magazines for each member of his/her class to take home to enjoy and practice reading English even more.  These two ladies are 2 of my work study students who have really been a big help and learned well.



These are my 2 mend/bind students who are learning book repair so the tasks continue to happen after I leave.  Our librarian will know too, of course, but both of these men have 2 more years to extend the life of the books at FTC and then help train someone else!  Joshua is standing and Simon is seated. They were learning about tipping in pages and errata pages today.

We set our first pole today.  We cut young eucalyptus trees in the forest and tied them to the post with strips of old tires to hold the post vertical.  The two young men helping are Derick and Mordecai.



Normally cement, sand, and gravel are just dumped on the ground and mixed with a shovel.  That ends up with grass and dirt mixed in the concrete.  Jim had a mud boat made for mixing our concrete.



The cement, sand, and ballast (gravel) are measured using a karia - the pan that looks like a wok.  The karias are also used to carry the concrete to the post hole.



The hole is 18" in diameter and is 5 feet from bottom of hole to top of black plastic tube.  It took a lot longer to mix the concrete and fill the hole than expected.  We started setting the pole at 8:30 and finished filling the hole around 3:00, just before the rain came.

Cheptulu has a market day every Tuesday and Friday.  People travel to bring their wares in big gunny sacks(big brown and blue bags behind the fabric salesman).  The bolts of fabric and cut yardage are displayed as close to the road as possible.  You can see in the background the many stands in just this one spot.





We welded the tied steel to the posts today.  The quality of steel is not very good so we had to file off sharp edges.



The black tube just inside the caution tape is a 100 liter water tank with the top and bottom cut out.  This will be our concrete tube to give us two feet of concrete above ground.

In preparation for setting the posts in concrete, we had a pickup load of sand delivered today.  Jim was unloading it with a jembe, a large Kenyan hoe, when Shemiah Wekesa came by in his suit and volunteered to help.  Shemiah is one of the students who normally helps Donna in the library.

The water in the yellow tank flows into a clear tube.  The level of the water in the tube will be the same as the level of water in the tank.  By marking the water level at all four corners we can establish a common height reference.

We have the holes dug for the posts and have started digging the trench for the wire to run from the panels to the battery house.



We also have been bending rebar to reinforce the concrete in the holes.  There are two pieces of rebar driven into a tree stump which are used to bend the rebar.



We had a convocation today.  Robert Wafula is the principal and he spoke about his recent trips to Uganda and Rwanda.  While in Rwanda he had someone take a video of him with his phone.  Unfortunately, the person had the phone upside down.  As we started watching the video, upside down, Jim went forward and turned the projector upside down so the video would be right side up.

These are our first library worker students Donna has trained to process and label books.  They are from 4 different levels of schooling here so this a great group to work with.  They are thrilled to be learning new library skills and are doing a wonderful and careful job.



Last week FTC cut down a tree to provide fire wood for cooking in the dining hall.  Cutting down trees is not desirable, plus it takes lots of time for the cooks to chop fire wood.  Also it produces lots of smoke in the kitchen.  One of their goals is to use the manure from the dairy to produce methane gas for the kitchen.

FTC is in a holiday break now so the residential students are gone.  In their place we have a group of more non-traditional students who come in 3 times a year for short courses of 3 weeks.  Donna recently had an interesting discussion with several of the students.  They were talking about what foods we eat in the US.  As the conversation progressed, one of the students asked Donna if we eat pig (pronounced peeg).  Before she could respond, one of the other students said "No good Christian would eat pig".  Donna decided that was probably not the opportune time to tell them that when she was in high school, she was the Iowa Pork Princess.  She did, however admit to eating pig and that her father and brother both raised pigs.



As we prepare for building the solar panel structure, Jim asked a local carpenter to make some saw horses.  As it turns out, nobody here has ever seen or heard of a saw horse.  It took a lot of explanation and sketches, but the end product turned out quite well.

There are numerous projects going on at the same time.  This is the beginning of the wall that will create a separate computer lab in the library.  The man on the left is William Jumba the carpenter and his two helpers on the ladder and table/chair.  Jumba does an unusually good job given the tools and equipment he has to work with.  The drill is one I bought and loaned to him.



The wall is made of raised panels top and bottom and will eventually have metal grill work in the middle to secure the computers.  Jumba hand grinds his own jointer blades to make the raised panels.  Yes, I said jointer.  Notice the wedges on the top right and left.  The ceiling sags 3 inches in the middle.



We are also replacing a water tank outside the dining hall to collect rain water.  This is the concrete base for the tank.  Notice the banana leaves being used to help the concrete cure slowly.  There are new gutters being added to collect the rain water.  Right now we have lots of rain to collect.  We are having heavy rain almost every day.

We were very pleased to get approval last Thursday to go ahead with the solar electric project.  Jim has everything staked out and men will come Monday to start digging the holes for the posts.



Most of Thursday and Friday was spent in Kisumu buying steel for the structure that will support the panels as well as various tools and supplies that will be needed.





This morning we were pleased to discover this beautiful moth.  It has about a 5" wing span.

There is so much thievery in Kenya that all doors and windows have bars on them.  We are building a computer lab in one end of the library which will have laptops.  The current window bars were spaced far enough apart that the laptops would fit through them, so we hired a welder to add more bars.  This is what it looked like when he was done.



Donna and Ruth scrubbed off all of the soot so the new bars can be painted.

This is Margaret Amudavi, the academic dean, making chai for us.  In general, Kenyans are very good hosts and sharing food is important.  Chai here is strong hot black tea with lots of milk and sugar all boiled together.



It took 2 months, but Jim finally got a step ladder built.  It did not turn out quite like the picture he gave the carpenter, but is works.

We are nearly done preparing the site for the solar panel structure.  We are now waiting for approval of the project from FUM before we can proceed.  We are still short of funds and they are looking for a way to advance us what we need in anticipation that more will come in later.



We normally have a management committee meeting at 10:00 Wednesday morning.  This week we did not have electricity most of Tuesday and Wednesday, and we had meat in the freezer that had thawed and needed to be cooked.  So Donna made a big pot of spaghetti and we had a working lunch in our house.



The large metal water tank in the background is filled by the government water department.  It is empty more than it is full.  So, we built this small water tower next to one of the staff houses so that it will fill from the big tank and then be a reserve for the house.



Part of the water tank project is adding an electric instant shower head - the white thing on the corner of the rug.  It ended up being a bigger project that anticipated.  They had to remove the old fuse wire load center and replace it with a larger one with circuit breakers.

Donna bought these cookies recently and she was looking to see the country of  origin.  They were made in the United Arab Emirates.  She also looked at the list of ingredients - two of which are Buffalo Milk and Buffalo Cream.

We started digging today to level the area where the solar array will be built.



Four days ago we had heavy rain.  It has rained off and on every day since.  Sometimes it rains buckets and other times it will be a light rain that goes on for hours.

Hopefully Monday we will start moving dirt in preparation for the solar electric system.  We wanted to take some pictures of the area as it is before the construction starts.  This is the chapel with the old administration/classroom building in the back right.  The solar panels will be off to the right.



This is the construction site looking back at the chapel.  The new administration building is to the right of the hedge.  You can just see a corner of the roof.  There are 4 terraces between the hedge and the road on the left.  You can just see a piece of the road in the top left.



This is looking from the construction site up the hill towards the administration building.



  There is a rope on the ground showing where we will dig out one terrace to create a larger flat area for the panel structure at the level just to the right of the tree.  The tree will have to be cut down.  The library is in the near background and the dining hall in the far back right.