Talk about starting off 2014 with a bang!  When our Director Judy Lorimer left for Mali in November we had just $55.65 left in our construction account. Then we received a $5,000 donation from a family foundation, $500 from the Four Square and a Roof Foundation in Canada, and $10,000 from ABTech Technologies in California, giving us enough for our next school!

The next school construction project has already begun in the village of Ngolokouna, in the Kapala Commune south of Sikasso in southern Mali. We decided not to wait until November because they really need help!

School construction usually starts in November during the cool and dry season in Mali. In a country whose economy is based on agriculture, nearly everyone is helping in the fields from May to October. During the hot season, usually beginning in February, manual labor gets increasingly difficult. However, as of right now, harvest time is over, no one is in the fields, and it hasn’t started to get brutally hot, so it made sense not to wait to get this project underway.

You can read some background about the village of Ngolokouna in this document (PDF, 120K) from our partners in Mali.

The two existing mud-brick classrooms in Ngolokouna. As you can see in the top and bottom photos, the windows are very small, so the rooms are dark and stuffy, and get very hot during the day.

Poor latrines for girls and boys. These do not have sealed tanks, so they can contaminate drinking water supplies if they are too near a well. The latrines BSA builds have concrete pits to protect local water sources.

Grade 5 classroom

Grades 1 and 3