More of your donations in action:

Continuing with Saturday, I also met with an engineer from the US named Bryce who helped us with some details about building. We need to do some serious grading to prevent water erosion and our design needs cross braces.

I met with Grace, our carpenter and foreman, to figure out what tools we need for that work. We used HFC donated funds for that equipment which included rakes, hoes, pick axes, shovels, post hole diggers, rebar pieces and twine for marking the site.

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Jen and Kelly were busy organizing the massive pile of donations from the community into separate groups for each family that lost their home. This was a lot of work as the donations were of all sizes and types. They spent several long hot hours working with all this in preparation for the distribution Saturday night which went really well. This photo shows the group that received donations. Each is acting as a head of household.

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I met again with the chairman to sort out the list of fire victims to figure out who lived in each home. This helps with the distribution but also with an attendance list so we can learn who in the group might not be helping with the work. We learned that some perfecty healthy residents are sitting around “letting the Mzungus build them a house”. These people are in the minority and the chairman knows who they are. I have no idea what he’ll do about it but so far he’s been honest and fair.

We also had a nice lady come and distribute clothes on her own. We heard the ruckus over in the field and investigated. She told us she was only giving donations to victims but I didn’t recognize any of the crowd from meals at night and none of them had our bracelets on. I’ve been working for hours on the list of victims with the chairman and we don’t even have it completely sorted, but she was convinced she had it sorted. Also, the heads of practically every household and many of their children were at Calvary working on the poles so they all missed out. She did a good service for the community and has a good heart and it reminded me of myself three years ago when I would just jump in and recklessly do something good even if it wasnt well planned, coordinated or sustainable. Good is good. Anyway we were glad to see some benefit for the surrounding community.

We also started cutting rebar to act as stakes and did the initial layout of the individual buildings. It’s cool to see the buildings taking shape.

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The night wrapped up with the meal
Service and Calvary showed the Jesus film to about three hundred people in the village. It ended up being a 16 hour day, but it was wonderful.

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