Welcome to Our Blog!

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first of many posts by the 2015 PUC Tanzania Team!

I'm assuming you're reading this to learn all about what we are doing and our progress along the way. Let me start by telling you exactly what our project consists of. We are currently designing and raising funds for a visually impaired girl's dormitory latrine at the Pongwe Primary School in Tanzania. For more details, you can visit the Our Project page.

Now, you may be thinking that it is pretty late to start raising funds for a project that takes place this summer. You are almost correct. In case you haven't heard, we originally had a funder who was an oil company who had promised us $30,000. However, with the recent drop in oil prices the company was run out of business and could no longer give us the funds we were originally expecting. So right now our team is working extremely hard to compensate for this by asking as many different sources as we can, along with being prepared to scale back our project to be more feasible with whatever we raise. We have been very fortunate to have some things work in our favor, such as a Kendra Scott profit share. By the way, this is happening February 17th, 2015 in Austin, so if you are planning on buying any jewelry you should go to Kendra Scott on that day! We also hope to soon join a UT fundraising platform, which will help us fundraise virtually!

We are also working on a more technical challenge while we scramble for funds. We are working on the technical design which holds many difficulties in itself. As you can imagine, this is most of our team's first time designing a latrine, and not just any latrine. We need to design it in a way that it does not use water to flush. Sounds crazy to us third-worlders, but in Tanzania, water is not cheap and readily available so the school would rather save it for drinking. Understandable, but challenging. Not only do we have to do this right, but we must do it quickly. Tanzania has a rainy season that lasts from March to the end of May. This means that we need to hire contractors to do all of the underground work before the rain starts so that when we arrive we can build the superstructure and finish the project. Lucky for us, we have two amazing technical advisors, countless professors, and other professionals that are giving us priceless advice to help us make sure we do this right!

With all of this craziness, we try to keep a level head (like George and Sarah) and will continue to update you along the way!