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GHAZNI PROVINCE, Afghanistan – The Ghazni Provincial Reconstruction Team visited Patoo village in the mountainous district of Jaghori here Oct. 14 to survey a school construction site and a possible location for a new dam.
The team traveled with Afghan National Police and drove in rented cars across bumpy unpaved roads for two hours to reach the remote village where an Afghan contractor was building a school for next year.
Patoo village members introduced their proposal to Angela Szyszlo, Ghazni PRT education specialist from Poland, in a previous visit to the village.
“There were only tents here,” Szyszlo said, recalling her first visit.
Szyszlo went to the PRT engineers, showed them the proposal and what she had seen, and the PRT said they could start the project. When the engineers visited the site Oct. 14, they saw where the land had been leveled by dynamite and chalk lines were drawn in the dirt to show the general layout of the future 12-classroom school.
Currently, 200 students, both boys and girls, are studying in tents during separate times at a location at the foot of the hill.
The PRT also learned that the last 20 days were spent starting the foundation to set up for the masonry work.
“We started so late in the season, we hope they’ll get the foundation done before the winter, and then we’ll have them start back up in March and finish this next building season,” said Bill Anderson, an engineer technician with the United States Army Corps of Engineers from Atlanta.
The school did have one different addition to it – a proposed soccer field.
“A normal school design doesn’t have a soccer field, but we asked for it,” Anderson said. “Just to let the kids have a flat space to kick a soccer ball around is value added. All the flat space in this mountainous area is being used already.”
After surveying the school’s construction site, the team visited a nearby river where an old dam was crumbling and no longer in working order. Locals said the waters rose last year to about 2 meters high, or 6.5 feet.
“The dam would be used to capture the melted snow for agricultural purposes,” said U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Mike Cernuska, the incoming lead engineer for the PRT. “This site doesn’t have the flow power to sustain a hydroelectric dam,” said the Mt. Pleasant, Pa., native.
| Date Taken: | 10.14.2010 |
| Date Posted: | 10.19.2010 04:18 |
| Story ID: | 58388 |
| Location: | GHAZNI PROVINCE, AF |
| Web Views: | 227 |
| Downloads: | 2 |
This work, Ghazni PRT surveys mountainside school, dam, by 1st Lt. Katherine Roling, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
