Painting a School
29th November 2005
Linda, a volunteer from Sweden, has been collecting information about
the sorry state of the schools in Dumangas. She decided to do
something about it and organised some paint and some volunteers to
descend on the Dumangas Central School for a weekend.
The hall that we were going to paint was in
a sorry state of repair. The walls were
covered with grime, the doors were ugly and some insensitive idiot had graffitied
one of the walls
I am the only one in my family who is not practical. For some
reason I just don't get it. So for this repair job I just did what
I was told.
To start off, the walls were sanded and all the dangerous objects
were removed. Bits of metal, chicken wire, nails. That sort
of thing.
We painted the walls with two
undercoats of white paint followed by a glossy top coat. The
rusty gray wire that sat in the window frames was painted
with silver aluminum paint.
Everyone who helped out stayed rather clean. Except me.
For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to put more paint on myself
than on the wall. My pants ended up
looking like they'd been savaged by a large flock of seagulls.
*shrugs* It was good fun though and some of the kids got a
laugh.
We did all the pretty stuff on the Sunday. Highlights include:
I had to leave a little bit early to play in a basketball game in
which I finally scored some points. Yay! We won the game
which means we make it through to the Magic 6 round with our 2 Win 1
Loss record.
I came back the next day and took some photos of the finished product.
I really enjoyed the weekend. It was nice just hanging out and,
I know it sounds odd, but I had been really craving some physical labor.
It is also nice to be able to leave something tangible in The
Philippines. Education is all well and good, but you can't point at it
and say, "I did this!"
Questions? Comments? Try contacting
me.
Wanna receive an email whenever this site gets updated? Click here.
(c)
2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena.
All the stuff on this site is written by me, Malcolm Trevena. Feel free to
link to this page. Heck, you can even copy stuff from here if you
want. Just make sure you sight me as a reference.
|
