Days 3 & 4: A Step into Reality and a Look Back at the Trip

The past two days have been spent on site, working with groundskeepers, and contractors, and largely just each other, to document the site and perform surveys and analyses. These past two days have also offered insight into my experiences thus far and perspective on the project as a whole.

With respect to my experiences and take-aways from/for the project, they were largely positive. I’m walking away from this trip more confident in the project. Typically bringing conceptualization into realization can lead to a lack thereof, but meeting with the contractors made me feel as though this can be done. We’ve put years of work into the design, and as we approach the end of that process, we simply need money. We have begun to develop seemingly reliable contacts that can assemble all of the moving parts.

I personally walked away from the our encounters with our contractors feeling good about the prospects of all of our potential contractors, neither seemed like a bad option, and both had clear, very desirable advantages over the other.

The following two days were spent on site, and easily brought the most realism to the project that I’ve experienced to date. You can spend years conceptualizing and planning to the T and talking with every single person who is and who will be involved in the realization of the project, but merely stepping on the soil that will hopefully someday bear the weight of this school was completely grounding (no pun intended) and inspiring, as strange as that might sound. Admittedly, the condition of the site said “we have some work to do”, but I’ve never been more inspired and driven to do it. We were completely foreign to the land but I know I immediately felt comfortable at home there. We were also treated as such, given the opportunity to meet the caretaker of the land, walk through the small farmlands to the bank of the Volta, harvest cassava, to be invited to a local farmers home to eat his watermelons with his family, and simply sit and talk with complete strangers as new friends, the word “rewarding” would not do it justice.

Finally, while it wasn’t our building and our design, spending time in the existing structure brought a level of understanding to the project that cant be found on CAD plans and Photoshop renderings. We were able to feel the way that shade and a light breeze can completely combat a hot and humid exterior environment to one that is cool and comfortable on the interior. With nothing but windows and open doorways, we were able to easily to work and write and take measurements in a comfortably well lit interior. We could see the structure in its barebones, the way materials similar to those we are working with will interact and connect and coexist. I was able to see our ideas, our hopeful and maybe far-fetched ideas of sustainable building, passive design, and a disregard for the standard or “status quo” of western building, manifest itself in what I would consider a success. I walked out of that country not hoping or believing that this can be done, but knowing that it can be done, and knowing that we can do it.