Habitat trip

I had the pleasure of chaperoning a high school Habitat trip this weekend. On Friday after school, another teacher and I took sixteen HS kids to a Habitat site four hours north of Nairobi. We arrived in the evening, camped out on the cement floor of a school house, and went the next morning to lay a floor.

Now, I’ve never laid a floor before, but the technique we used is not quite what I expected. First we shoveled rocky dirt into the house and mixed it with cement powder using shovels. We then spread the dry mixture across the floor, soaked it with water, and pounded it flat using broad wooden … pounder things … that I’ve never seen before. In short, we spent the morning breaking rock, shoveling, mixing and pounding. Great exercise, great weather, good kids = fun trip. Hopefully the new floor will work out for them.

Below is a view from the bus on our way up to the site. Central Kenya is beautiful. The cloud-topped “hill” in the distance is Mount Kenya. Elevation: 17,058 ft. It’s on the to-do list.