Underground Update

Hi everybody! With a little more than a month until we travel to Tanzania, we are working extremely hard to get everything finalized before we travel. Of course, we aren’t the only ones who are racing the clock, everyone over in Tanzania that is currently working with us have been doing everything they can to get the underground work completed.

One thing that we have been working on constantly is fundraising. We were lucky enough to raise an amazing amount through the HornRaiser platform, $9,020, in our allotted time. Not only were we fortunate enough to be able to use this platform to help us, but we were then allowed to extend the amount of time we were able to accept donations! We now have another 12 days to reach our new goal of $11,000. If you are interested in visiting our HornRaiser page, you can do so here: https://hornraiser.utexas.edu/project/54e7891a092065499d8db4c5 .

This brings up another important fundraising project we are trying to pursue. Our project manager has entered us in a video contest. To be considered by judges for an extra $1,000 or $2,000 towards our project we need to get as many likes as possible on our YouTube video. If you have a spare second, we would love if you could go here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxWwyN56a-4 and like our video.

Now, onto updates on the project itself. We have been receiving constant video and picture updates from Mohamed about the progress of the septic tanks and soakage pits. These have resulted in good and bad news. The good news is, they are obviously working very hard and are excited to be putting the finishing touches on the first soakage pit. We are about halfway done with the underground work. The bad news is, the excavation for the septic tank has caved in due to the rains and they will need to re-excavate in order to finish.

Caved in septic tank excavation

One of the soakage pits

We were also able to finalize our foundation drawings this past week with the help of our structural engineering advisor, Ken Hanks. Creating the drawings for the foundation has been a challenge due to cultural differences (mostly because of the CMU available in Tanzania and their lack of rebar usage) but it was one of the engineering challenges we signed up for and we were able to send the drawings last Monday. That means, all that is left for the design is the design of the actual superstructure that we are going to be building at the end of May.

Wow, that was a lot of information. Hopefully we will have just as much good news to share with you next time. And again, don’t forget to go vote for our video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxWwyN56a-4 ! I have also shared a couple of the photos we recieved, but all of them will be in the photo album part of the website.