Hat Sa
Before the finer details of the project work in Hat Sa and the trails we had to go through, the most important thing is that this project was a huge success in the end! There are now five taps at the bathroom at the school- a tap in each of the toilet rooms and a sink along the outer wall with three faucets. The water tank is extremely strong and has a capacity to hold approximately 1600 liters of potable water. The students are thrilled to have water and we are so happy we were able to play our part in bringing it to them with the help of our donors.
None of this would have been possible for GROW without Bamboo School, a German NGO that has been working in this region of Laos for 5 years now. Their focus is primarily on education through the construction of schools and boarding houses as well as a new shift to health and sanitation. It was Bamboo School that built the boarding house and bathrooms at the school in Hat Sa and they continue to support further work initiatives there, including that of GROW. For assistance in tools, translators, lodging and just finding the project in the first place, we send out huge thanks and best wishes to the continued success of the development work Bamboo School is doing along the beautiful Nam Ou.
The main components of the project were the construction of the water tank, building of a foundation for the sink (as an erosion control measure) and the construction of the sink itself. When we turned on the water for the first time, our focus on the sanitation and hygiene educational component of the project became greater as now the kids had two faucets in the bathrooms where they could put into practice what we had been preaching.
While building the water tank we used a ferrocement method; we had learned to use this technique once in the past while working in Guatemala, but it was the first time we had done a tank above ground fully using this method. The idea is that it emphasizes the strengths of both the cement, rebar and wire mesh frame and combines them to make an extremely strong structure at a cheaper cost that can also be designed to whatever shape or specifications one might need. Our tank was a cylinder, a form which has additional strength over a cube. For more information on how we built this tank, go to the document on ferrocement from the link at the bottom of this article.
With the support of our first two GROW volunteers who worked alongside us for five days and a Bamboo School volunteer who also helped out, the overall construction of the tank went rather smoothly. The connection of the tank to the bathroom, the sink foundation, and the sink itself were a little tougher to complete as we no longer had additional volunteers and had to depend more on the support of the community. Although this was troublesome at times, we did have some great days where the community pitched in and provided ideas and help for the project.
Every project has its setbacks and this one was certainly no different. One main concern when doing projects in this region is adapting your work to the different seasons. During the dry season you deal with blistering heat and a lack of water, and during the wet season an abundance of rain. For the sanitation and hygiene project we were expecting hot, sun-filled days that would not affect freshly poured concrete, or wash away a day’s progress of building a retaining wall. But this was not to be the case as the rainy season decided to come more than a month early. Although massive rainstorms were refreshing against the heat, they certainly impaired progress.
With the rain also came unusually high winds that unfortunately caused a tree to fall on our water tank early on in the project. Luckily only the foundation had been laid and our rebar frame constructed by that point. The foundation survived intact and it was just a matter of removing the tree and re-bending and binding the rebar to get back on track. That was tree number one. Tree number two was a much bigger setback- mostly because the tree was much bigger. A giant mango tree with a diameter of about a meter and a half, maybe 90 feet tall came crashing down on the students cooking huts and bathroom which was the site for our planned sink. What was a very well constructed and nice structure of concrete, metal, zinc and wood roof became a massive jumble of rubble. The septic tank was also damaged leaving fresh sewage exposed just meters away from the children’s cooking huts; a problem that needed immediate attention. When you’re talking hygiene the toilet generally comes before the sink; plus our sink was supposed to be built along a wall that now only partly existed.
Although the mango tree coming down could be seen as bad luck, we were in fact extremely happy that it came down where and when it did. The tree was very old and had been decimated by termites and rot. It was going to fall at some point and if the wind was blowing in the opposite direction that would have been on the boarding house. The timing was also in our favor as all of the children were home in their villages for the Pii Mai celebrations. With 84 children constantly cooking, cleaning, using the bathroom and running around in the rain, the incident could have been devastating! This disaster was the primary factor in the duration of the project taking longer than expected.
So now in addition to the water tank, the sink, the garbage collection stations and the education initiative, we now had a septic tank and a bathroom to rebuild. We placed the septic tank as our top priority and within a couple days we had repaired the frame, built a form for the cover and poured the concrete. When the cement dried the tank looked as good as new! The bathroom was a little more difficult. The mango tree was mostly removed from the bathroom by arranging a community work day. It was a beautiful thing to see! Around 50 community members, machetes in hand, all pitched in and in a couple of hours they had chopped or hand sawed most of the tree affecting the bathroom. With the tree removed, GROW got to work on getting one of the two bathrooms operational and by the time the children returned for their new school week they had a working toilet.
As for the roof, the walls of the second bathroom and the second toilet, GROW met with the community and a decision was made that GROW would provide the materials for the roof and the cement to reform the building’s columns. The community in turn would provide the labor to rebuild the building, constructing the walls out of bamboo- a material that looks nice, is sustainable, and a material the community members are experts at using for building. This unfortunately did not work out to be the case as the community fell through on their part and only built a poorly constructed temporary roof, failed to get any bamboo for the walls, and refused to reconstruct the columns. This was by far our hardest day and this lack of community interest was by far our largest hurdle to overcome.
The level of community involvement was primarily the result of the relationship between the community and the boarding house students. Since the majority of the children at the school are not actually from that community and received the most benefit from the water tank and sink, the community was not as interested in helping with the project as we would often expect and demand for a project of this type. The ethnicity of the students also played a role in the lack of involvement from the community as most of the non Hat Sa students where Kamu and seen as a lower class than the Lao students. These issues were hard to overcome and at times the only reason we didn’t threaten to stop the work entirely was because the implementation of this project benefits these eighty four children who live away from home and have absolutely no one to look out for them. And as far as help and involvement, the beneficiaries, the children, were a big help- they were often the ones to carry up sand or rocks from the river for us when they were needed, and when they were not in class they were always very curious in what we were doing and often helped. Sometimes we did not have the words to communicate, but they would observe us and start to mimic what we were doing in order to help. A task like sorting our small sized stones from a massive mixed pile went from daunting to fun when there we about 20 hands in there helping and laughing along with the work. Plus it was an educational initiative as there is no “shop class” offered in school and the children gained valuable\ construction experience they can draw on in the future, plus having two positive role models in their lives. For more on what it’s like to have your work site swarming with 84 young children all the time, check out our new GROW blog!
So with some help from the community and even more from the students, the tank and sink were finished. As a special inauguration of the sink and an important part of the educational component of the hygiene and sanitation goals of this project, we held teaching seminars at the school for all of the 132 children. There are two nurses that live and work in the village who assisted in the day by instructing on the basics of tooth brushing and hand washing. GROW purchased new toothbrushes and small toothpastes for all of the children to take back with them to their villages upon the completion of the school year. Soap was also purchased for the demonstrations. These types of purchases are not typical for GROW because they are not sustainable in the sense that once gone who will replace them. But in this case, besides the educational component to go along with the gifts, we have a commitment from our project partner Bamboo School that they will continue to support the initiative of maintaining soap at the sink and toothbrushes and paste for the children.
So the sink was christened with soap and toothpaste of 264 hands being washed and 3612 teeth being brushed (that’s 28 teeth per 132 kids, with a few missing!). For the water tank we had something else in mind. At a previous community work day the people of Hat Sa painted our new tank a bright white and with the children we threw in some color- kids had their pick of green, blue or red for putting their hand print on the work that they helped us create. This also helped emphasize hand washing as they needed to scrub and scrub to get the paint off. We actually found out too late that it was oil based (all the writing was in Thai and no one could read it); as Donny tried to scrub away (he was the first guinea pig to show what to do) all he accomplished was rubbing the blue around to look like a smurf. So we got our blue hands on some paint thinner (that would be gasoline here) as the first hand washing step then they moved onto the sink to finish off the job.
An additional aspect of the hygiene and sanitation project was in the creation of trash collection sites around the school grounds. Bamboo baskets were made and secured to hang in permanent structures- five in total. We were constantly emphasizing the importance of proper trash disposal to the kids, though sometimes we would then almost immediately see them throw a wrapper on the ground, or sweep out their rooms and dump all that they swept over the railing. Progress on this front is slow but occasionally we would be surprised when we would come across a full trash basket or see a student pick a piece of garbage off of the ground. Regardless, we must keep trying- at least now they have a place to put their garbage and we have seen some improvement.
When we leave Hat Sa after seven+ weeks of work, we leave a successful project in capable hands. The water tank, the sink, and the garbage collection sites are all permanent structures and will save the students from the boarding house countless hours of carrying water while making it easy to put into practice the new lessons they have learned on hygiene and sanitation. After further meetings with the community leaders and our partner, Bamboo School, it has been decided that the bathrooms will be rebuilt by the community and will be ready when the children return from break in August. Bamboo school will also take over the health initiative in the area and will be providing GROW updates as they come.
For a much more thorough description of our time working on this project in Hat Sa, please see our GROW blog for a day-to-day account of both the work and trials and tribulations.
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