Fortunately the children were late from school so I had time to pop to site, my morning had been chaotic and spent between buying clay for tomorrow and getting a tyre fixed (just before I was about to leave I noticed it was flat).This visit to site proved to be one of the most important so far. If I had managed to go early in the morning, I could have avoided it from start but I still managed to stop the mistake anyway.
All the building has been plastered with 2-3 coats (the third one is not exactly as I would have wanted but it performs well nevertheless) but today when only 6m were missing on the exterior wall, they tried to cut a corner. They claimed that the first coat could not be applied because of the sun, but as soon as I explained, it took very little time to convince them that it could not be like this. I would not certify such work, and they understood that they could not get away with it. So chop, chop, chop, let’s take it all off, and do it again properly.
As soon as I can tomorrow I will head out there just to check if it is now up to standard. It would be a pity to spoil such a good job at this moment.
This sorted I got back to the kids and we had a nice introductory lesson, about Litema. As I may have already mentioned, Litema is the traditional form of decoration used in the Basotho households. It originated in the XIX century with the introduction of the plough, and roughly resembles ploughed fields, hence the name. I have decided that it would be nice to introduce this in the new building and today we started a 3 day workshop with which at the end I hope to have produced enough panels to use on the building.
The children enjoyed the session, and some of them picked up the idea quite quick. It was also interesting for me that many of them did not know the meaning of this type of art. Luckily ‘Me Lydia was keen to explain it to them and hopefully from now on they will be more interested in it.
No comments:
Post a Comment