Kapilvastu is also turning green

After the success of building Earthquake resistante green schools in Bardiya. The Earthquake day is a proper occassion to celebrate that Kapilvastu partner SSDC is now in charge of four new schools in Kapilvastu, in conjunction with the Nepalese government!

The Auram machine for making compressed earth blocks presented by one of the village volunteers.

Text and photo: Anne Mette Nordfalk

15. januar 2009

The District Education Office of Kapilvastul has decided to provide 5 lakhs rupees for the construction of fpur new school buildings of the same type that were built by MS and BASE in Bardiya. The rest of the money will be provided by MS and by the voluntary work of villagers.

"People are not so easy to convince here in Kapilvastu. But we will succeed, with our experience from Bardiya", says a confident Husna Banu Sheikh, programme officer for the school project. MS local partner SSDC (Siddharta Social Development Center) who are managing the project with the help of masons and experts from Bardiya, puts a lot of effords into especially getting the muslim madrassa schools into the main stream "therefore we decided that one of the new buildings should be given to a madrassa school", Banu adds.

The special roof pillars are being produced and made to cure.

At the moment the project is waiting for test results to get the final go ahead and in the meantime villagers are waiting impatiently: In one of the selected places the children are currently going to school under the thatched roof shown below.

Current school.

Victory in sight

Apart from this new common project an even bigger victory for education in Nepal is in sight. Department of Education has signaled that it is ready to approve the "Green school" design within a couple of weeks. This means that the Green Schools will be among the official designs that the Government of Nepal will offer as options to its School Management Committees in its quest to built the 50000 new class rooms needed to meet the 2015 millinium goal.

Meanwhile interested engineers are preparing to go to Auroville in Tamil Nadu, South India, to learn the new technique. While Sonam Wangchuk the initiater of the first Green schools is preparing himself for even better schools made from Earth in France.