Before Goats For Gals, the other major project I worked on in my site was get a new classroom and bathrooms built for the Community Association of the village. In a nutshell it's this: the Association, which until a couple years ago had been fairly inactive, opened a new preschool building (occupying a small part of the Association grounds) a few months after I moved here. The preschool has been successful, but like all public and most private buildings in the village, it lacks latrines. As a Community Health Volunteer, one of my primary tasks is to improve community sanitation standards, often by building new latrine facilities and educating about their importance, hygienic use, and care. At the same time, the members of the Association were coming to me with ideas for expanding their campus to build a new classroom for a women's literacy group, which was just beginning to form but didn't have a proper place to meet. Eventually, these two projects got rolled up into one, and we got funding from USAID for constructing a new building that will house a dedicated classroom for the women's literacy group, and two new bathrooms which will serve both the preschool and the women's classroom. We hope to have construction finished before the beginning of February. Here's some snapshots along the way.
Front view of the Association complex
The site before construction began
Inside the preschool classroom
During construction, recently
