Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away..

Ok, so my mate Steve has got a cool blog about his 'soil-based fun' so I thought that I might give it a shot too! For those who don't know me, I'm a Civil Engineering gradute from Bath, UK and I'm volunteering with Engineers Without Borders-UK in the wonderful town of Jozini, in Kwa Zulu Natal, in South Africa.

I'm working on a loo-building project at the moment; in the area in which I live the South African government has a backlog of 85,000 outdoor toilets which it wants to build for people who currently don't have one.

The problem (as I see it) is that they can't be build the things fast enough. The government hires builders to build the loos out of concrete blocks and they are of a pretty bad standard, and take too long to put up make. The builders don't make much money out of them, which may explain why a lot of them are of a pretty shabby quality.

So... For the past 6 weeks or so I've been working on a design which uses a plastic fibre mesh-reinforced concrete panels (Textile Concrete) for the walls, roof and pit-lining and a dome-shaped slab (which I found on a website about low cost sanitation) to go over the pit.

Anyway, I just thought I'd write this as a record of how it all goes!