On a site visit earlier this year, Henry Katongole, now our Chief Community Development Officer brought me over to a foundation wall that had just been started. Strewn about the site were all the materials and tools one would usually see, a pile of bricks, bags of cement, string, a level and then a particularly-long metal bar a mason had just picked up. He positioned it horizontally and checked it against the three new bricks he’d just set. As I continued to watch, Henry looked over and said, “this is our latest innovation.”
Henry, a staff veteran who has overseen construction at five different Building Tomorrow sites, has developed a penchant for consistency in construction. One Saturday he went to a metal fabricator and designed this tool that would ensure an even application of mortar under each of the 24,000 bricks it takes to construct a Building Tomorrow primary school, saving time, supplies and money.
It has been a great privilege to me working with BT, first as a CDO (community development officer) and now as admin and logistics officer. I have been able to serve the under-served communities of our country. I have seen children working alongside their parents at all sites with much hope that at last they will be able to access school in a good study environment, in BT school structures.
In my new role as a logistics officer I provide major support to a growing group of CDOs by coordinating the delivery of materials to all sites; a job that involves long hours of travel. But the benefit of seeing more children in those remote areas come to BT schools smartly dressed in their BT uniform with hope and joy surpasses all hurdles we go through to contribute to the future of these children.
I want to thank all people who are involved in this great work the world over. Long live BT.
As work soon begins on Building Tomorrow’s 20th site, innovation is in no short supply. From seeing one of our first communities entirely self-fund the construction of teacher’s houses, academies throwing termly open houses and the soon-to-launch Building Tomorrow Fellowship, our work in Uganda is supported by an ever-growing legion of supporters who are, in their own ways, innovating on the Building Tomorrow model with an eye towards leaving significant long-term impact.
This holiday season, we invite you to support Building Tomorrow as we gear up to construct ten schools throughout Uganda in 2014. By giving The Best Gift. Ever., you will allow us to continue engaging new, rural communities in the Building Tomorrow model as we make progress on our goal to construct 60 schools by 2016.
–george
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