Orphanage

The orphanage - almost complete

I thought I'd give a mention to another one of the projects we currently have under way here. The Alulamile Children's Village. A place to provide a home, love and care to children orphaned in our surrounding community.

Construction is almost complete (when are builders ever  on time!?) but we are still outstanding some materials so I spent the whole of the afternoon yesterday drafting an appeal letter with photo's to show to local building suppliers in a hope of receiving donations that can see us through to completion.

Today some of my colleagues are off to Maputo to see if they can make any headway in getting the outstanding materials. I wish them luck! and hope they return with the car overloaded!

 

Burglar bars installed

 

Burglar bars - a necessary evil

"Let me out!" - Hendrik doing the fitting

Finally getting the necessary security in over the windows, you can see from the bottom picture above the mosquito netting on the window is still broken. Just in time as we had new ingredients arrive last night which I really can't afford to replace.

The one bag of flour we had stolen meant we couldn't bake yesterday so that is lost earnings. Good news is I secured an order of 50 breads for delivery this afternoon. That's quite a large one off order which hopefully will bring repeat business!

Burglar bars

Nice Shades! - Grinding / cutting the steel to size for burglar bars

Despite the poor aesthetics of having steel burglar bars over the bakery's windows I think it is a necessary evil (see previous post). 

I have another 150kg of flour and other ingredients arriving today and can't afford to lose any more, so the construction of burglar bars is well under way. I hope to have them installed by later this afternoon. Will this deter the thieves? lets see, but I hope its a psychological barrier that will stop them trying again. If they really want to get in they can always smash down a door but the bars should keep them out for now.

As for the bag of flour that was stolen it has meant that I have no flour with which to bake today, a big hassle... that's a big chunk of the weeks income lost. I've asked the bakers to come in later tonight when the new stock of flour arrives but they are notoriously unreliable at obliging to these requests.

Building the oven - Part 1

I've been thinking about if for the last week or so and often get a lot of questions as to how I built my oven. I'd like to get some of my design and building photos posted but to be honest the first step was much simpler than that; researching the design. I had never built anything like this before but somehow was confident I would be able to find all I need to know to build a wood fired oven online. Just put the keywords in Google you might think... yes but then you get 153,000 results, so where to from then? For anyone thinking of following in my footsteps the below list includes a few of the websites I found useful. Note I have not used any of their designs exactly but adapted them to my requirements (more on that later):

Traditional Oven - Quite an extensive site with everything from designs to recipes

Log Cabin Chronicles - Guide to clay oven building, not too technical though.

Forno Bravo Pizza Oven - They sell ovens but have this oven design available for free online.

Fitzpatrick wood fired oven - Good photos on this site from their oven build.

I found these sights useful but most of them are based on designs for outdoor pizza ovens, nothing wrong with that, but i felt the need to adapt this for my needs. Namely I wanted the oven door to open into the bakery and not to be fed entirely from outside, saving walking around with bread dough exposed to elements etc.