A hands on Workshop in the field

Nirmal Kumar Tharu, sharing technical issues faced in the construction

Workshop Day 1

Today we had a hands-on workshop for the DOE engineer's delegation. The workshop began inside the same building which we started building less than three weeks ago. It started with a session on climate responsive architecture with me after which my colleague Nirmal Kumar Tharu, the Construction Supervisor at BASE shared the technical issues faced in the construction. Then in the afternoon we all went to see CSEB block making in another village where we shall be building the second school in a month's time. The second school will be a sort of economy version of the current one. It will cost less and can be built in even shorter time, but the classrooms will be as big and as earthquake safe. On the way back we also visited the type 1 school in Bangai, which was built with conventional materials, and had developed some water problems.

While the workshop was happening, side by side the masons and volunteers finished the things they could not finish due to the ceremonies yesterday. It was mainly the laying of waterproof plaster on the roof.  Yesterday while the ceremony was going on people had filled rice husk ash in the valleys between channels and then compressed it with feet. Today they first put gravel on top of the ash and then plastered the whole roof with cement reinforced with chicken mesh i.e. ferrocement.

DOE delegation observing block making with Auram 3000 press