African Roads

In the western world, we take good roads for granted, and complain loudly when we hit a small pothole or bump in our journey. We often hear from visitors that the most shocking thing they experience in Africa is the shaking and near misses they undergo while on journeys to the North. This lack of road infrastructure keeps communities isolated and cut off from development. Well, this week we invested our manpower in solving our road challenges at the Connect Africa Hub. We have 20 acres of a valley that we have begun to develop, carving out the jungle. I always give visitors a 3-foot long knife-like machete and let them hack away as we wind down narrow paths, partly to use the free labor and partly to have a handy tool if we encounter any snakes. Earlier this year, we killed a 7 foot Mamba on the land. Since then we have become highly motivated to slash the path clear, and make a bunch of noise in the progress.

February 2009, a team of 6 surveyors and architects from EMI Canada came to the CA Hub and in a one week (a whirlwind of long days and late nights) produced a 3-phase site plan for the Hub’s completion. (Let’s give a shout to the EMI team!) So, with these blueprints in hand, we have started putting in our road, shovel full by shovel full. The mountains of fill produced as we dug our Hub conference center out of the dirt have to be hand shovelled into the multi purpose crusade truck, and then backed up onto the hillside and hand shovelled out, trip after trip, day after day. I have a few blisters, but as I write this, we are seeing the first 150 meters of road starting to wind its way down into the valley.

We have a real “hands on” approach to problem solving at Connect Africa. One of the core values that we promote in every community we come into is to find out what resource is available on that ground and use it to help them transform the situation by “putting our hands to the task” together. Recently, I had our guys weld together some scrap steel into a road-levelling machine, and by dragging this behind the old Land Cruiser, we have our own road building equipment that we can use to build our own roads. I think the most amazing thing is the transformation that happens in our Connect Africa team as we face a problem, such as African roads, and within a week get to walk on the solution we created with our own hands and a little sweat, a road in the jungle. Now only a few hundred loads to go and we will be driving, pole, pole, (slowly, slowly) to the finish.

Trev out