Tanzania Education Project: second onsite bulletin from Meserani Snake Park, Tanzania 15/08/05

Saturday August 13th was the midway point in the construction stage of the project. It was exactly a month after the advanced party arrived at Meserani and exactly a month before the provisional opening... and what progress has been made...

All the floors for each of the 5 buildings (library, computer room, classroom, toilet and shower) at the centre have been put down. Each one in itself a mammoth task. The computer room and classroom had to be put down in consecutive days and the effort from our volunteers, many of which were suffering from a stomach bug, can only be described as superhuman. Having seen us struggle with the computer room, we were joined on the classroom floor by 30 volunteers from the local community who had come to lend a hand - one of which had walked 10km just to come and help for a day - that day ensured in our minds that this centre was going to be taken up by the local community successfully.

The walls are up on the 3 main buildings and the roof for the library is going up today, to make an iconic, yet stylistically traditional central room. The clinic is very close to finishing with extra paintwork and fittings all that remains.

Our medics working in the clinic at Snake Park are doing a phenomenal job. Their fame has spread so much so that people are travelling for days to come and see them and last week they did the longest ever shift at the clinic. They are looking forward to looking at resourcing the new clinic and getting the two working in tandem.

The AIDS group are making progress and forging links with local NGOs. We are hoping that close to the opening of the centre we will have a large AIDS awareness day combined with a public health campaign.

The opening itself is provisionally set for Tuesday September 13th, to coincide with market day. To open it we have Edward Lowassa, the Tanzanian Minister for Agriculture and widely tipped to be a future president. He is a Maasai himself. We hope as well to have the British High Commission in attendance.

But for now we must continue with the building of the centre so that it will be ready for that great day.