Several weeks ago I was talking with a couple colleagues, and they mentioned that they were wanting to build an addition to the school they worked at. I’d visited the project a couple times before, it’s located in Janga, just north of Recife. The recently got a lot more kids, and so the current facilities are pretty packed. They’d been thinking about this for a while, but wanted someone to help draw up some plans. I pointed out that this was not really my area of expertise, i.e. I know basically zilch about structural engineering, but I said I’d love to help however I could.

So this past week we arranged for me to head out there and stay with my colleague Hildjane and her family while creating these plans. I was a bit nervous, hoping that they wouldn’t expect too much of me… I got there, and shortly after Hildjane took me on a little tour of the place, explaining what all it was that they were hoping to add. It was quite a bit. Four new classrooms, a teacher’s room, new bathrooms, and a larger, more open, but still enclosed all-purpose room with a stage for gatherings of the whole school for presentations and things like that. They had some other requests as well, but they were even less in my area of knowledge, so I focused on the addition. They also wanted to make use of natural ventilation and lighting as much as possible, so I set to work researching that as well.

First of all I took some measurements and got a basic idea for the existing structure, then set about playing around with options for the addition. The next 2 days I worked quite a bit, trying to draw from my knowledge of this type of structure and pull out any creative architectural ideas I could. At first I was still kind of nervous that I wouldn’t really be able to give them what they were hoping for, but as it when on I got more into, and got more excited about how it was developing.

I ended up having a lot of fun with this project, getting a chance to do something completely different from my normal work, and I think it turned out pretty well. Obviously this didn’t change the fact that I’m not a structural engineer, so I stressed that these plans would just be a sort of jumping off place for someone who knows what they’re doing to finish up, but they were still very excited. I think they were just glad to see a visualization of the dreams they’d been having about expanding the school. All in all it was very satisfying.

Another great part of the experience was staying with Hildjane’s family. She and her husband, Leka, have a daughter, Rayanne, and a son, Ragner, who are in high school and middle school, respectively, and it was so fun hanging out with them. We played dominoes a couple nights with other folks from their apartment building, and, get this: we played Settlers of Catan! I couldn’t believe they had it! Apparently some of the former MCC country representatives had brought it with them and taught people here how to play. The moment they pulled it out I knew we had to play. And boy, was I in my element; I won both games we played the first night! First I had to clear up a few rules that they had forgotten, since all the directions are in English, but it was so much fun, I’d forgotten what a great game that is. Then, we played again the next night, with everyone gunning for me. When it became clear I was close to winning, things turned wild, with the other four trying desperately to not let me win, haha. It certainly dragged it out a while, that’s for sure, and they had me worried for a bit, but I still managed to pull it out. Calvin prepared me well!

So, all in all it was quite the week, and I enjoyed very much the change of pace. Since coming back to Brejo I’ve been learning to use Google SketchUp to create a 3D model of the planned addition; man, that’s a sweet program. I’ll leave you with a picture of the existing school project and a rendering from SketchUp of the addition I designed! Fun stuff!

the existing structure - the open space to the right is where the addition would be built

a rendering of the addition from Google SketchUp - the part on the left is existing (you can see the two windows in the first picture)