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.