A Virtual Photo Tour of Twegashe School
We’re closing in on completion of the phase 1 construction of Twegashe Primary School. We’d like to invite you to join us for a virtual “photo tour” so you can see for yourself how things are progressing.
We’ll begin at the teacher duplexes on the top of the hill. Approaching from the lane we’re on the back side of the houses, where the bedrooms are located.
If you move to the area between the houses you can see the school building down below. Let’s head down there now.
Welcome to the K-3 classroom corridor. We’ll step into that first door on the left and check out a classroom.
The first view is from inside the doorway of the teachers’ office at the back of the classroom. Notice how the sunlight coming in the clerestory windows bounces off the angled ceiling creating additional diffuse lighting in the classroom without letting in the sun’s direct rays—more light and less heat! You can come inside and get a better view up into the clerestory area. And now if we go to the far side of the classroom and into the doorway of the breakout room you’ll be in position for the third view, looking from the doorway of the breakout room back into the classroom. Like the teacher’s office, the breakout room connects to the classrooms on either side. It can be used for small group work, tutoring, projects and storage.
As we leave the classroom, let’s step out into what will be the courtyard once Phase 2 construction is completed. If you turn around, you’ll get a nice view of the front side of the classroom building.
Now we’ll continue down the corridor to the cafeteria/auditorium. This large space is partly enclosed, but also has an open-air portion.
Beyond the cafeteria is the kitchen. Here we are standing in the kitchen, looking back through the serving windows into the adjacent cafeteria.
Now let’s step outside to take a look at the cafeteria and kitchen from the north end of the site. The small building in the back on the right is the construction storage shed.
Just to the right of the shed (not visible in the photo above) are two worm-based composting toilets being constructed for kitchen and maintenance staff. These will be used by Twegashe teachers temporarily, until staff toilets are installed in the administration building as part of Phase 2. On the back side of this toilet building you can see the access for cleaning out the digestion pits once they get full. You may be thinking the pits look rather small, but worms are very efficient digesters. Reports indicate that with up to fifteen uses per day the pits only need to be emptied once every two or three years. A larger block of composting toilets for students is being built down the hill from the school building.
From here we can head back along the rear side of the classroom building. The section with the slightly higher roof and two protruding windows is the breakout space and teachers’ office between the first two classrooms. There is an identical feature between classrooms three and four.
Before you leave we’ll return to the teacher duplex. We can rest a bit on the porch there, enjoy the view, and imagine by early next year Twegashe students playing happily on the sports field below!
