New Parot Church Building: Part 1

On the left and below are pictures of the Parot Community Church building. As you can see, it has fallen into quite a state of disrepair.


For the past nine months, the congregation has been taking special offerings to collect funds to build a new church.  The construction finally started mid-March.

The new church will have mud walls and a thatched roof, just like most of the houses in Parot. Instead of building the walls first, though, the builders started with the roof; once it's done, the walls will be built.

Because the rainy season usually starts in April, the goal was to have the roof on before the rains came, and then be able to build the walls with some protection from the rain.

The new church is being built next to the old one. The first step in the building process is to dig holes and put in the poles that go around the perimeter of the building to help support the roof. 

I went over one Saturday morning to see the work. The fellows working are young men from the church. They dig the holes using a long tool with a small metal blade on the end. 

The holes have to be quite deep in order to provide a good support for the poles.

Near the top left in the picture above, you can see a lot of slim branches. These will be placed into the forks of the support poles and wrapped and tied in place with split palm leaves.

While the men were working, church ladies were busy making tea for them.

At the end of the day, I went over to see what the men had accomplished. They had really worked hard, as you can see below. They had finished the perimeter posts and the support branches that go on top of them.