Restroom Upgrade for 60 High Schoolers, Sapa - Vietnam
In Sapa, Vietnam there is a housing program that gives room and board to 60 high schoolers. All the students come from nearby isolated mountain villages.
With barely any pocket money for hygiene or school supplies, life for the students is definitely not easy. And to make things worse, the students have to share three working toilets out of seven, and heat water in a wood stove to take warm showers. In the wintertime, many students choose not to even take baths often because of the harsh freezing conditions. The nights were also challenging, especially those scared of the dark, because only a couple of the restroom stalls had electricity and light bulbs.
Our goal for the program was to give the students access to a clean restroom and hot showers. To accomplish this, and in record time for us, we hired two plumbers, two electricians and two handymen to do most of the technical work. The students and us made sure to have the place clean and painted for the crew. The hard part though was the language barrier and getting people to follow our requests (not easy).
In all, we were successful at unclogging or fixing in someway all seven toilets, installing electricity in all the restroom stalls, adding an instant electrical hot water heater, three new showers, two new ground toilets, painting all the walls and ceiling, adding a new water faucet/outlet for easy water access, buying eight new trash cans and plastic garbage bags for a year.
The total project took four days to complete and with a total project cost of $778.
