In Uganda, people have found a clever way to build buildings cheaply, by making the bricks from the soil under their feet.
People fill brick forms with mud and then place the dried bricks into a tower with a hollow space at the bottom to build a fire. After several days of drying over the fire, the bricks are ready to use.
This is a really inexpensive way to build, but there is a catch. Unless the bricks are covered and sealed by a layer of plaster, they will slowly return to mud when it rains, and the building will eventually fall. But plaster is expensive, so this step is often delayed for years.
This was how most of Kingsway’s buildings were built. They are up to 15 years old and none have been plastered yet. (This photo was taken in April 2021.)
On the building below you can see many places where mud is seeping from the bricks. The ladders were there because cracks were already visible in the interior walls. This was causing the US board of Kingsway to lose sleep at night!
So when a generous supporter of Kingsway stepped up with funding, Milly and our board all decided that this critical task was the next thing that needed to be done. (We decided to delay work on the upper stories of the girl’s dorm until after this was completed.)
The building with the ladders on it has now been plastered and painted, and in areas where walls were cracking, they were repaired or reconstructed. So now take a look!
Hooray! The building looks completely new and it now matches the new girl’s dorm. Here’s a photo of the rest of the buildings in the process of plastering and painting:
Over the past few months, we’ve been able to plaster and paint almost all the buildings and it looks like a whole new school! But the change is not just cosmetic, it was very important to do this before the buildings started to fall.
We are just so overjoyed.