This week kicks off HIFA (Harare International Festival of the Arts). Embassy’s send their top acts from all over the world for a week in culture, it ranges from various kinds of music (classical, reggae, pop, jazz, opera), to various kinds of dancing (ballet, hip hop, flamenco, ballroom, African), to play’s, picture art in the National Gallery and more. The whole city shuts down for the week, people take off work and spend hundreds of dollars and for a week you forget you are in Africa, you forget that the troubles that are going on and Zimbabwe gets together and has a great time! The last 2 weeks there has been numerous national holidays, April 18^th was Independence, April 22-25^th Easter, May 2 Worker’s Day, so the construction team is off for 2 weeks. The construction team comes from all over the Nyanga area so they live on site and work in sets, 2 weeks on 5 days off. So in order to get their days off and all the holiday’s in they are off until May 1^st, so I thought I could do some work in Harare, get a change of scenery and enjoy some of HIFA. I started my HIFA extravaganza with the opening show, which I was told is the best show every year, and it was great, it’s done by the HIFA team with singing and dancing. It’s extremely political and they get away with it. A friend of mine works for HIFA and I asked how they get away with it, it turns out since the festival is supported by all the embassy’s and brings in HUGE revenues HIFA can pretty much do what they want. They are also very good at being subtle or at least not standing on a soap box preaching about the government, they use music, singing and dancing to do the job. My second show was from the Irish Embassy, a traditional band called Kila, very good, really entertaining and just a good time. The next night I was given a complimentary ticket for the opera gala. This was unbelievable, it was snippets of various operas from “The Marriage of Figaro” to “The Magic Flute” to a whole bunch of German operas I’ve never heard of before. It was done by the Britain’s Embassy with help from the local opera choir. It was really nice. Finally on Friday I went and saw the Zimbabwean National Ballet do a mix of ballet, jazz, contemporary, hip hop and tap. The company is mostly white, which surprised me it was a bit disappointing, there were 2 or 3 that were fantastic but only out of a dozen or so.

Currently the manual brick press is making 100 bricks a day, which is nowhere near where I thought it was going to be. I talked to the “professionals” in South Africa and they said we should be making 4-500 a day? So we went over the system on the phone and found a few places we could speed things up but it wouldn’t slow us down that much. So the contractor and I had a light bulb idea, what if we put a hydraulic system onto the manual system to speed up the process AND it would make the brick press both manual AND hydraulic to make it more versatile. The contractor asked a farmer if we could borrow their hydraulic brick press to try our idea. We could easily remove the hydraulics and replace them at a later time. This got complicated because we thought we had it sorted and the farmer decided that if the new system worked she wanted the new system and it just became ridiculous SO I had another light bulb idea, what if we found someone to fabricate the hydraulic system for us from scratch especially for our machine and just cut out the middle man, AND I asked around AND my colleague and local contact in Nyanga knew someone in Harare, who specializes in custom made brick presses so tada!!!! I fixed the problem, maybe on the phone it sounded very promising, we’ll see what happens in person when I met him. After meeting him I am really excited, his work shop was unbelievable, the innovation of his machines was incredible. He had created a machine that you put all your rusty nails, brackets and such in turn it on and it cleans them without chemicals or water it was amazing. You dream it, he can build it or he can dream it and build it. So he’s coming up to Nyanga and look at the machine, watch the guys use the machine and see what he can come up with, he’s my kind of person!!!

We HAD liftoff on April 7^th for a few mere moments until someone had an idea to change the plan. Instead of going larger and do add-on’s like the offices and conference room that were never part of the original idea. So why not do just the library and lay it out so that in future the rest could be added. It then would become an incentive for the community to use the library and show that more investing in the community would be a worthwhile project. So we made the library bigger and got rid of the rest and sent it to the contractor. THEN I hear from the contractor that the materials are bought and paid for and we’ve paid for the area of the original building, which would’ve been helpful knowledge back when we had the original building that didn’t quite fit and I would’ve made it fit!!!! So now I went back to the original plan and did some CPR. Now I have the original building with some changes, AND I suggested that we kit out the library and leave the rest, explain we are doing what we originally agreed to and the community needs to kit out the offices and conference room by donation or fundraising or whatever, but then they take responsibility for the building. So it’s been a week of back and forth and I feel like nothing has been accomplished. But it’s not just about the drawings I seem to be doing many jobs and spend the day doing various things and accomplish little in various areas and not making any big strides in fewer areas.

MY DAY

5:30am. Up to let Molly out

6am. Clean up her room, make her breakfast, she eats, I shower, eat and get ready for the day

7am. The phone starts to ring, usually calls from the contractor with the days events, my local colleague with the days events, my job to fit it all in

8am. Collect emails and send emails from the evening before

9am. Site meeting

10am. Deal with morning emails

11am. Start working on drawings

12pm. Lunch

1pm. Work on various things that have come up in the morning, currently that’s game plan and ideas and furniture for the interior of the building

4pm. Write out new emails and send them out

5pm. Check in with local colleague for any updates or issues

6pm. Dinner

7pm. More drawings and dealing with afternoon emails

9pm. Let out Molly for the last time and put her to bed and a little r and r

10pm. Bed.

Lots of this depends on ZESA, which recently has cut out at the WORST times and obviously causes things to take longer like cooking. Now you may wonder where do domestic duties come in, well along with my house came domestic help a fantastic person named Jonathan who has become my saving grace, I would never have clean dishes, laundry and my house would look like a frat house if it wasn’t for him. The yard would look like a jungle. My other saving grace is coffee, I know this sounds bad but it makes me happy and it keeps me going plus I don’t think it’s as potent as Canadian coffee because I can drink 5 cups a day and have no issues sleeping, although to be fair sleeping has never been an issue for me and I guess with working like I do, sleeping comes easy. This coming weekend is a long weekend due to Independence Day. 31 years ago on April 18^th Zimbabwe became a “free nation”. A little piece of trivia for you, Robert Mugabe was not the first Shona president of Zimbabwe a man named Canaan Banana was, that’s right President Banana was the leader of Zimbabwe at Independence, there isn’t much out there about him and he’s not talked about and I’m sure if you asked a ZANU PF person they would say it’s always been Mugabe.

Late yesterday good news came my way. A decision was made that the original plan with sections moved around in order to fit was the way to go. The building area and materials used would remain the same. It took a slightly different shape but it will work!!!! So now construction digging has started full swing with no turning back and I can finally do the drawings full out without any changes. A huge weight has been lifted and we’re back on track.

Lots has been going on the last week. I went to Harare for my month visit. I help out at an AIDS clinic and get my monthly supplies. We are now starting to work on the interior of the building, which for various reasons should have happened sooner and later. So I’m in the midst of looking for furniture, computer hardware and software, the works! So I started at this ikea kind of place called OK Mart and then found an agent to do the work for me, I just give him the list and he sorts it all out! Plus this agent could also handle the zambulance situation, which I will explain later. Anyways I also went to get the test results from the brick testing we had done and it was not good. The tests should have showed at out of necessary 8MPa (mega Pascal, how compression is measured) we by law require an 8, we acquired a 1.65. Now I know what you are thinking, we didn’t just fail we tanked, our bricks are 20% of the mandatory requirement where did we go wrong? Well this is what I asked myself for the next 3 hours. I went over the math of the mix, the mixing process, the labour, the machine and on and on. When I went to drop off the bricks to be tested, I like an organized, efficient individual called ahead and got a quote and name and all the requirements necessary for the bricks to be tested. So when I showed up, the man who does the testing explained to me that the price I was quoted was to small and $60 per 10 bricks was not enough, they now wanted $210 per 10. So after negotiations and talking to the manager of the department I got my original price. So if the tests showed a failure I’d have to come back and do it again and then they can charge whatever they want and my hands are tied. I’ve talked to a few people, in the industry and people who’ve done projects here and this may be an actual probability. It never occurred to me this would be the case, I looked at myself and what we were doing, not anything someone else would do. I am still looking at those things and we are changing some of the variables and trying some things to see if that improves things, we also broke one ourselves to see what happened and it didn’t look horrible and it broke really nicely and the 3 of us there all professionals were impressed. So we’ll see what we can do, we are also looking at finding another place to use for testing like the Construction Association of Zimbabwe, which works for the industry. Another thought we had is to mix a hydraulic brick press with the Bamba brick press. The size, design and make of the brick press with the power of creation of the hydraulics. This will speed up the manual process which is taking too long and might be a reason the bricks aren’t tough enough (if in fact they are).

Now on to the zambulance as I promised. A zambulance is a bed attached to a bicycle and used as an ambulance. The zambulance has a cover over the bed to provide weather protection, privacy and ventilation. But there are some design flaws, improvements and new ideas to come to this amazing invention and I’m working on it. What gets me everytime is putting one of these is a rural area means a little old lady in desperate need of medical can be put into a zambulance and taking to a clinic or a hospital or where ever she needs to go and won’t die or become chronic or permanently ill because of something that could easily be fixed. Or a pregnant woman having complications can be taken to hospital and not risk herself or the baby. This is why I’m here to help a community with little to no resources improve by giving them the resources to do it.

And that in a nutshell has been my last week, which is still going and more gets added to the list but that’s why I said we’d do this in 6 months and not 4 because nothing runs smoothing, things will go wrong and do go wrong but it’s all in the learning and it would be boring if it was all smooth sailing.

The good news is TODAY, APRIL 7TH, 2011 they started excavation for foundations! We have lift off.