Blog: Mission Possible, Tanzania, Aug 2016. From Cement Blocks to Prayer Mats.
Past the halfway point of their deployment, the hard work continues for our Mission Possible volunteers in Tanzania. As Akeel Iqbal explains, a day’s duties can range from working with construction labourers to provide a new toilet block at a school to cleaning a local mosque.
Akeel Iqbal: Today, just past the halfway point of our Mission Possible deployment in Pangani, was split into two parts, the first being our school sanitation project and the other was a water project.
We started off early in the morning and headed to Mzambarauni where our school sanitation project is taking place. We all collectively as a team helped with the structure of the building, the digging and the other key parts of the building process such as making the cement for the bricklayers. We worked as a team alongside the fundis (local builders) to speed up the process of completion of the school toilets.
I was leading the sanitation project so I decided the way to speed up the process is to provide the fundis with help. The idea was to help them in such a way where they were not waiting around for anything such as cement, cement blocks and tools.
We also added cement to the cement blocks so the builders were ready to add the next layer of cement blocks. This worked excellently and by 1 o clock the bricklaying part of the school toilets was almost complete. Everyone also got involved in the digging for the septic tank and we reached a total of 7ft by 1pm. The initial depth of the septic tank is 10ft so we easily reached this target today.
After we finished the first part of day we headed to a mosque in Ubangaa to install a rain water harvesting system. This part of the village did not have a close source of access to water. So we installed a rainwater harvester system for the locals to fetch water and for them to do wudhu before prayer.
Having helped with the installation of this, we decided to clean the interior of the mosque as it was quite dirty. So we carried out a ‘brush and mop’ in the mosque and placed the mats back in their original position. A long hard day today of manual labour, I hope Allah Tala accepts our efforts with helping the locals with the mosque.
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