Wait is over!

The arch is standing! Here is the evidence

Murthy, standing proudly under the Arch he helped build. Guna is getting busy to start on the next one. We actually use only mud and bricks, no cement at all. All construction in Puvidham uses very little cement. Mainly at the foundation level to prevent termites crawling up. Otherwise it is mostly mud. Here you can see Mani and Selva mixing mud with their feet..



Turning to more mundane facts, I spent two blissful hours yesterday evening programming! Yes, now I do programming as a relaxing aside from my stressful day job of teaching. I created a small relational schema to hold information about my students assessments. I can now prepare report card for each student and get them signed from their parents! I used Open Office for this with their HSQL and the forms and reports! Yeah, I can hear some mumble that this ain't no programming... I know I should have used RubyOnRails but with Reliance Wireless Connect as my connectivity to Internet I don't have the bandwidth to download it!

So far this school year i have conducted 9 tests for the 8th class students (poor things!). I showed them the grim outcome today. Only 2 have cleared (35%) all the tests. hmm.... reflects poorly on the teacher, doesn't it?

Now to the real stuff

The class 8th students of Puvidham are now building real arches in their hostel building. I did not know it was so goddamn difficult to build a wall straight. We had to bring down the walls 3 times before we got it right. It is really a lot of skilled work. In any case there was slow progress (5 days) and we now are at the stage of building arches. Thrilling, I must say. But wait till we remove the scaffolding! The process
- Build side walls
- Use bricks as scaffolding
- Use string with radius length like a compass and create scaffolding with mud
- Arrange bricks on top of this platform with mud filling the gaps
- Those who have faith pray and others like me just worry and wait....


Murthy admiring his handiwork....

Ravi and Mani finish their first arch... you can see the scaffolding for the second one next to Ravi..