We were lucky enough to find ourselves surrounded by the very brainy and enthusiastic 2nd year Engineering students from the University of Pretoria, who came to the shelter to complete their community service for Tuks. They took it upon themselves to designand build our drainage system for our Puppy Central kennels. They even cleaned the kennels beforehand to understand exactly what problems we were encountering. Below is a few words from Michael Garvie, on why this project was so important to the team 🙂 Photo’s below.
“We are a group of Engineering students from the University of Pretoria. As part of one of our modules, we are required to complete a community service project of our choice. The group decided we wanted to be able to use the knowledge we had obtained thus far in our degree while aiding a needy organisation. We stumbled across Ark Animal Centre thanks to one of our members having recently adopted a puppy from AAC. With the chance to not only test ourselves but also aid needy animals, we agreed that this would be the project for us.
Due to the slope of the land AAC is situated on, heavy rains are a danger for the bottom kennel which had been flooded before, due to rain. We decided we would design and build a drainage system in each kennel, which would allow the rain to be channeled away from the puppies and their kennels, and into the drainage system. It took us a week of hard thinking and even harder work, but we managed to finish. We had put the drainage system into action and secured a mesh over it to prevent puppies getting into the drains. Every test we tried showed the drain to be fully operational and more than able to handle heavy rains, even with the slope of the land. We would like to thank management at Ark Animal Centre for allowing us the opportunity to aid them. We would come work again in a heartbeat. “
From all of our puppies and staff at the shelter, we would like to say a massive thank you to this team of young South African’s for their time, commitment and passion they had during this project. They came in with a fully mapped out plan, followed it to the tee AND completed everything on their own, leaving nothing for us to “clean up” afterwards. We are so grateful that we have a fully functional drainage system now that is working phenomenally well. We are so thankful and appreciative of all your efforts, and you are all most welcome to come back at anytime 🙂
Ark Animal Centre 