A Disabled friendly School

Masons building the ramps for the wheelchair, while community volunteers make a gentle slope away from the building.

By: Sonam Wangchuk

30. september 2008

Today was another day of small things. Well since most of the school is already done it will now only be smaller things. Much of the work happened on the roof top where we filled the valleys between the ferrocement channels with concrete mortar and after that we cast a base for the rooftop ring beam. Similarly, work started on the ceiling inside, plastering the ferrocement joints.

Filling the valleys to join the ferrocement channels.

Left: Filling the channels to make a base for the roof top ring beams. Right: Rice husk ash arrives from a nearby brick kiln.

On the outside walls the in situ casting of the ferrocement overhang shade finally finished today. We felt that this shade took unusually long and cost a lot. Four masons worked continuously on each of them for roughly five days. For the next building we would definitely want to pre-cast them rather than in situ.

The in situ casting of ferrocement overhang took really long, pre-cast would be cheaper.

On the ground outside some more interesting things were happening. For example we started the ramp for wheel chairs as it hopes to be an inclusive and child friendly school. Side by side on the ground near the school some workers made a gentle slope away from the building so rain water always goes away from the building. Similarly finishing touches were given to the black boards inside the classrooms. Apart from teachers black board the classrooms also have low level black boards along the bottom of the walls, for the children to write on. Parallelly the electricians were finishing the fitting of switches and sockets. The whole thing proved very easy for them because we had put the wires in already.

Tea time

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Tip for today

Hot summer cool roof

Roof of the houses in Terai plains are an important source of overheating of the house.

School roofs are often made of tin sheets so they understandably overheat during the day making the classrooms often hotter than the outside. But most of the residential houses have a four inch thick layer of bare concrete slab; now concrete turns black with time and the roof becomes a device for absorbing all the suns rays. Since concrete has a good heat storage capacity the heat of the sun all collects in it and then after a time lag of few hours reaches the inside of the room by which time the entire roof becomes a giant heat radiator. This is just the time when the occupants return home from work. It is sadly possible that a teacher or a student suffers the fury of the sun all day under a tin-roof classroom and then reaches home in the evening to suffer a second time all the stored heat of the day, thanks to the concrete ceiling.

In our school building we shall have some 15 cm of rice husk ash used as a locally available light weight and natural insulation material. Above the ash would be a layer of waterproof plaster with chicken mesh reinforcement, in order to keep the ash dry. For this the plaster will also be coated with bitumen paint to make it further waterproof. And above this we shall have a layer of green turf to protect the roof further from the rays of the sun. Apart from this we shall grow lots of creeper plants covering and shading the entire roof with leaves. As the leaves perspire there would also be evaporative cooling of the roof area. I find it amusing to think of all these plants as small self pumping air coolers, drawing water from the underground and taking it to the rooftop level, naturally!