Monday, February 25, 2008

Trip to Africa

Here are some pics from my February trip to Sudan. I went out for a few weeks to get a bridge project started in Yabus, Sudan. Our friends the Faders live and work out there, so I stayed with them while surveying the site and finalizing the design. It is a beautiful place and in desperate need of a bridge to enable students to get to school, the sick to get to the clinic, and families to get to the market year-round. The bridge, which is a cable-suspended, wood-deck pedestrian bridge, will span 75 meters and will be 1.06 meters wide (just wide enough to drive a Honda Grizzly ATV across, if you can drive in a straight line).

The Faders work with SIM and they run an adult school that teaches English, Science, Math and Social Studies, and they are building a secondary school which will be the only secondary school in a 200 mile radius.

Eli arranged for some of his students to help me out with the surveying, and encouraged me to make it an educational experience for them. I spent quite a bit of time trying to explain the simpler concepts in surveying, and we had a load of fun with the walkie-talkies.
This was an incredible trip, and while the pictures help to tell the story, they are only capable of telling a fraction of it.