Brazilians encounter local challenges in building a sustainable school in Liberia

In Africa, it is: “do as the Africans do.” And so it is that for more than three months, São Paulo journalist Vinícius Zanotti and builder Fábio Ivamoto Peetsaa have been living in the Fendell community on the outskirts of Monrovia the capital of Liberia, a West African country.

That is where the duo is building a low cost, sustainable bamboo school for 300 young people between the ages of three and 17 years who are today studying in a very precarious building. It is called the Bamboo School Project that was created in 2010 and now is beginning to get off the drawing boards.

Since the end of January, Vinícius and Fábio have been living in a warehouse without water or electric power alongside the future school. They bathe with a gourd from a bucket. Meals are served in collective fashion: everyone sits on the floor around a common platter and food shared with anyone present. Telephones, cameras and computers are charged by a car battery adapted to a power inverter – as is done in many other places on the outskirts of the cities and in the rural areas of African countries.

Working with a group of Liberians in the Fendell community, the Brazilians work sunup to sundown to build the bamboo structures that are filled in with Adobe brick, made from mud. “It is hard work but it is going well,” said Vinicius, the creator of the project. “We have finished the bamboo structures of modules one and two. Last week we began work on module three. There will be 12 all told, with 10 serving as classrooms. And the others contain bathrooms and office for the teachers in the room where one person will take care of the school,” he adds. The project should be completed in July.

Valuable partnership
Bamboo is an abundant raw material, inexpensive and abundant in the region. It has been used as a raw material for construction in Liberia for a long time, principally in the structures of warehouses. “Nevertheless it deteriorated quickly because it is cut with a machete and is basically un-treated,” said Vinicius.

For the Bamboo School Project the way the bamboo is harvested and treated was changed – now the bamboo is cut with a kind of saw and coated with a resin to preserve the wood. In addition, the project brought with it two other innovations: a piped-water system fed by a nearby river and a generator built from magnets and a broken computer hard drive and bicycle wheels.

A partnership was established with the Katata Vocational Center, similar to a vocational school in Brazil, to monitor these technologies so that they can be absorbed by the local population. The Center accompanies the construction of the school step-by-step so that the construction process can be readily replicated. “The idea of perpetuating the initiatives is one of the basic premises of the project,” says Vinicius.

“On the project, things are going very well, and we have been pleasantly surprised. All we had to do was complete the bamboo structure and two young men working with us learned the technique and began to build Modules two and three on their own,” said Vinicius.

He sees the greatest challenges lying outside the project. In a little more than three months, the Brazilians have been stopped at least 30 times by the police, anxious to solicit a bribe even when there were no irregularities. “This winds up slowing down the work, because it almost always requires a long negotiation,” complained the journalist.

In addition, they have had difficulty in finding some parts on the internal Liberian market. The country has practically no industrial production of its own and almost everything is imported. When the architect André Dal’bó came during March, he brought with him 3000 nuts and bolts. The price on the Liberian market was US$.30 per piece for parts made in China.  High price and poor quality. We also brought picks and shovels. Here in Liberia you can’t get them, said Vinicius.

To learn more about the Bamboo School project visit the project website: escoladebambu.com