Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Third time in eight days that I've accompanied the students on their NSTP project: making a library for a nearby public school. This time I only accompanied one student from the actual group whose project it is. He is taking up Engineering, while his groupmates are Business Administration. Thus they have a different schedule and were not vacant yesterday. He was accompanied by three other students from other groups who still needed to devote some of their hours to be credited to NSTP.

They were discussing that given how much the first group has already put into the project (both in terms of money and effort) that it should be the work of two groups instead of one.

The guys from the other group haven't even started on their project yet, and it's already the ninth week of the term. Both they, the students, and we, the faculty, are already foreseeing that there will be a mad rush to finish their hours before the end of the term, resulting in more time that we will be accompanying the students.

As predicted, the dozens of cockroaches exposed when the plywood walls of the library room were torn down yesterday (and hiding in the corners) had become active in the middle of the night and found other secluded places to spend the daytime hours in.

Yesterday we applied a second coat of white paint to the walls. A first coat was also applied in the restroom, on the part of the wall nearest the roof (there was no ceiling), and on the part of the wall closest to where the roaches were yesterday (where everyone was afraid to approach).

I also took some pictures of them working, as if my signature on their certifications wasn't enough.

Unfortunately, no one brought a saw, otherwise, we would already have been able to nail the other pieces of plywood to the wall.

The other students will be working on Monday (during their teacher Elaine's class; she will be undergoing an operation) where they will apply the third coat and hopefully put up the plywood wall completely and paint it as well.

What surprised me was that Thursday last week was their first day of working on the library, when I saw them pulling nails out of the walls, patching the holes in the wall up with putty, sealing holes in the galvanized iron roof and mixing cement to cover the large craters on the floor. That was also when the first part of the wooden wall was torn down and replaced. The second part was removed two days ago.

Unfortunately, they don't seem to have enough budget or man-hours for replacing the broken wooden window slats or adding a ceiling. I don't know about fixing the electrical system of the overhead lights either.

And they also have no idea what to do about the room's flooding problem during the rainy season, which is what ruined the library in the first place. This is because the back of the room/building is on higher ground than the room itself, and water runs off inside.

They float around ideas about a small moat, but it seems the principal also said something to them about leaving something for the government personnel to see that would need a larger budget allocation for the school to repair.

This program needs some more planning at that.