Day 8 - OSET and Tetaki Mine

A busy day in Francistown began with a visit to OSET - Out of School Education and Training. At OSET, they are working hard to provide education to adults and children who did not have the chance to go through maintream schooling. Here, we started with the adults campus where we had the oppertunity to chat to the learners about each of our disciplines and discuss our project posters, before engaging in our prosthetic hand workshop. The response from the learners was fantastic, with everyone having fun and having conversations about Botswana and engineering. As well as academic learning, OSET strongly encourages life skills development so we brought some seedlings over from a nearby farm for them to plant in their gardens. The adults taught us how to plant the seedlings in the soil, taking care and compassion. This was a lovely moment where both us and the learners got to learn something new, and take away a new skill from the day.

Afterwards, we made our way to the young learners campus where we worked with children of varying ages within primary school. We worked in teams to create some extraordinary paper straw rockets, the children learned everything about rocket power and had a 'blast' racing them against their peers to see who's rocket could fly the furthest. We ended our session with a favourite childhood game of ours - duck duck goose, where we spent our extra time running around in the sunshine.

We were kindly provided with a delicious lunch from OSET, before heading to Tetaki Nickel Mine for a site visit. The mine has been out of service for several years, but are working hard to develop the site for future use. We had a lovely introdution meeting with some of the engineers and learned all about the mine and how it previously functioned. Following our safety briefing, we got kitted up into our hard hats and high-vis, and began our tour of the facility. It was fascinating to see how large the scale of these operations are and all of the equipment they used, as well as learning about the start to finish process of mining.