An Email from Mantay!

I woke up to a lovely surprise this morning—an email from Raquel, the truly remarkable woman who founded Mantay. She told me that one of the newest mothers, who arrived in ill health (as many of them do), has since gained 2 kilos. This is about 4 pounds. She also let me know that she is adapting to life at the home and that she gave birth last Thursday to a healthy baby boy who she named Kevin. One of my favorite things about Spanish is the phrase for giving birth." They say "Dar a luz," or in English, "to give light."

Raquel's email was also packed with information that will be extremely helpful when designing, and ultimately building, the library. She gave us the average price of common construction materials. As I guessed, these materials are brick and cement. This is actually wonderful because neither of these materials are expensive or hard to come by, and they are sturdy and provide a nice thermal mass. She also gave us some average prices for materials so that we can get started on drafting a more accurate budget for the project.

Finally, the library will be built as the second floor of a preexisting building and Raquel sent us a number of photos of this building. We now have a better concept of the space we have in which to build. Thanks Raquel!


The library will be built as a second floor above the green building. On the first first floor, the room on the left will be renovated and become a classroom. The room on the right is the laundry room. Luckily the building was built with the intention of eventually adding a second floor, so no major structural changes to the first floor will be necessary.

Macky Franklin  – (October 19, 2010 at 7:42 PM)  

Sounds like things are falling into place. Nice job! What are you planning to do about the roof on the existing building? Will you be reusing it?

Victoria Henry  – (October 19, 2010 at 7:51 PM)  

Hi Macky,
Although the building was built to eventually support a second story, the current roof obviously won't be able to act as the floor for that story. We will have to take off the roof and build something that can act as the floor for the library (2nd story), but we plan to save the roof tiles if possible and reuse them on the new roof.

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