Up! Up! And away…

March 9th at 9pm I will fly out and the mission will begin. As a case study for finishing my diploma at FAUP (Porto Architectural School), I've decided to volunteer and join A4A (Architects for Aid) in one of their humanitarian architecture projects. The projected on which I've been assigned is the construction of the LCCU (Lesotho Children Counseling Unit) centre in Lesotho. The building has been halted and an assessment, survey and new proposal and program will be drawn up in order that the building might finish to be built. Once this is completed a second trip will be organized and I'll be overseeing the building on site. The objective of this blog is to keep record of the work that is being done, both for the benefit of the members of A4A in London, FAUP to whom I'll also be reporting, my own record as well as friends and family that might want to know what I'm up to. Please comment on any post that you have an opinion, as this will undoubtedly help me in the completion of my thesis. Disclaimer: The information displayed on this site has not been previously edited or checked by any A4A staff and I'm the sole responsible for it's contents. A4A or any of the other involved organizations are not to be hold responsible on any account for what is published on this blog.

Friday, 20 April 2007

We’ll start on Monday!


As you can guess from the title the meeting with the funders went well. It will be a Sentebale/SBL joint funding effort. And I was given the green light to start ASAP.

So as soon that meeting was over I was on the phone to the Builders and in less than 2 hours we were discussing starting on site Monday… He seemed motivated and we spoke through some of the issues that will need addressing and he seemed to be on the same wave length as we were.

Extra motivation was delivered by showing him examples of Lesotho’s glorious Heritage and assuring him that not only we’d like to achieve a good building for the children but also a landmark that all could be proud of.

So Monday the hard work will start on that but until then I will not be resting… Tomorrow 8am I’ll be picking up the 4 students that volunteered to help and all together we’ll go and a have an initial visit to Lydia’s House site.

So that’s two projects being dealt with… The third one, the container shelter will probably be done in different phases. It occurred to me that maybe we don’t need extra storage… we could just shift the contents from one division to the next and deal with it that way.

That’s it for the day… More news tomorrow!

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