CAS Blog - November

Two interesting forth-comings in Habitat for Humanity (aka Habitat) and Computer Club (aka C-squared) have kept me pretty busy. The first of the two, Habitat, organized builds for its members to go on. During the second weekend of November, I volunteered to go to a remote village to the north of Dhaka to help build one of two houses that were at the site. It was actually more a a refurbishing than a from scratch build. This was the case because the owner previously lived in a corrugated tin shack, dangerous and poorly protected against the monsoon. The Habitat for Humanity organization aims to change that, giving this family man a sturdy dwelling by the beginning of the next rainy season. Our build was only a small part of the whole house and arguably the most important one, the floor. Straining our backs to shovel, shift and mix over 200 baskets of brick, sand, cement, and water to obtain concrete, we laboriously (but still carefully) created a floor. According to our trip leader at that time, Mr. Steffens, this stuff would last almost a century (if not, at least 50 years).
Secondly, our C-squared team advance in our goal to create a functional website for our club. With the absence of Mr. Read during some of our meetings, we collectively decided that the best course of action would be to have each member specialize in a sector of the website. With the building underway, the website has big potential thanks to the efforts of Erfan for scouting for useful tools and a newcomer, Tanveer, who will be responsible for image editing. In a way I see myself as a group leader, although not officially appointed as one by our project coordinator. I constantly get decision making questions asked and am the "go to" person for anyone with troubles. On that note, I hope to be of some help to my peers as I am the only one with prior experience with Dreamweaver, the application with which we will be constructing our website with (although the decision is not final - the proposition has not been run through to Mr. Read.) The learning phases are slowly coming to an end, we aim to pick up pace on production during the next meeting!