Producing construction documents takes time, and I was able to complete them just before going on maternity leave last February! (Curious what those look like? I’ve included a small number of sheets below!) Thankfully once the drawings were ready so was our team.
Throughout the few months between my maternity leave and our home assignment I was out on site almost every week to ensure that our team’s questions were answered, and they had what they needed to proceed. Construction here in Uganda looks very different than in the US, so this was an incredible learning experience for me (and for our team!) as we pursued a project unlike anything EMI has done before.
Construction began how it almost always does… with a lot of digging! The playground location was set on a hill, so we wanted to take advantage of that in the design and provide a more dynamic playspace with different levels. The entire site was hand-dug to ensure that the grading was accurate. Our friend Alex, a Ugandan architect from another firm, came to visit the site one day. When he saw the playground under construction he exclaimed, “I’ve never seen anything like this!”