Excellent! - excellentdevelopment.com

Many of the community turned out to welcome the Quest volunteers (above).

The building of a dam brings everybody together, working as a team. The hard work starts long before the Excellent Development team arrive, with the community collecting stones to fill the dam. Building begins with the Fundis (craftsmen) constructing the timber frame of the dam, which is then filled with cement and the collected stones, and reinforced with barbed wire.

Meanwhile, further down the bank cement is mixed by hand using shovels, and a production line is formed to transport the cement along the river bank, up to the dam.

As you can see, both the volunteers and the community work extremely hard, but the work is carried out amidst an atmosphere of carnival, with much singing and dancing. We have some recordings of the singing that accompanied the scenes you see here. Choose from Mbuani, Nzaaya-Muisyo 1 and Nzaaya-Muisyo 2. The words in the last two say "Working on dams is very hard, but Joshua & Simon asked to come, so that's what we should do.....!".

The dam extension built in Mbuani Valley. The volunteers also built a large new dam higher up the same valley (see bottom of page).

(Left) The children from the Miuusini Primary School are all smiling faces after the team help to build a water tank at their school.

Here are the children from Miuusini Primary School again, who came to help out building another dam.

Update - Mbuani dam revisited

Above left is a picture of Mbuani river valley before the dam was built. The completed dam is pictured above right in January 2006. It is full of water from far away hills, providing vital supplies during the extended drought. When complete the dam will fill with sand and store water below it.