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March 19, 2007
Aw ni ce from Bougoula!
 Happiness, happiness and happiness, our school house is totally completed. The painter came this week to do the painting. This part is less hard than the other jobs such as foundation digging, carrying bricks to the site supervisor...and it requires fewer people too. The only thing we did was to hold the paint bucket for the painter, gossip with him and jokes with him as everyone here loves to do. The women, gossiping, carried water to water the school walls morning and evening. It was a great and fun work even though it coincided with the big cotton sale in the village, when all the men bring all their cotton to the trucks that carry it to the city, Bougouni, but even with this major distraction we were eager to finish this great work on the school, so we did our best. One Thursday when the students were coming home from school (they don't have school in the afternoons on Thursdays) they stopped to admire the building first and then helped in pushing the wheelbarrows full of plaster to the painter.
The chief of the village told us this about the kids in the village:
"I'm sometimes sad watching our kids walking early in the morning or coming back from another village late in the evening, very tired; because we up until now haven't had any school in our village where our kids could get educated. Some of them spend the whole without eating or they take half decomposed food. I mean the food they brought with them from our village to their schooling place goes back by the time they eat it at midday. These factors discourage many parents from sending their kids to school."
Drissa Kone, 45, a farmer who has never been to school and who has worked hard on this project, had this to say:
"What can we say to these kind persons from whom our village got a nice school except 'thank you'. Yes, thanks for this most important present you gave us because education is the most important thing human being have on this earth to prepare their better future."
The schoolhouse is completed and the painting is done. The BwB staff in Mali would like to thank BwB and its donors for the school they have have waited for years to have.
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