I went on my first outdoor camping with a tent experience EVER on Saturday. The Vumba also known as Honde Valley is a shaped like a bowl and traps in the heat. It’s known for it’s coffee, tea, bananas, mangos, lemons and avocadoes. You can get 100 bananas for $1! Friends of mine have bought a plot of land, out there, which is considered hard to come by and people kill for. It cost him $90 for the land and only $40 of it was for the actual property the rest was to the Chief, the King, the king’s wife, the assistant who took him around, the man who sold him the land and the Council. He has a year to put a building on the land, any building it can be a toilet, a round hut anything as long as there is something built otherwise it goes back to the Council and someone else can buy it. I learned how to pitch a tent, which was easier than I thought it was going to be. When we got to the land there was a goat tied to a tree, which became dinner!!! We only had the meat from the goat but I was told that if you wrap the intestine around the stomach and cook it on a spit over the day it’s a delicacy and really tasty. I was happy we didn’t have time to cook the intestine while we were there as that was a bit more than I was willing to do.

The project is at a bit of a standstill, Council is dragging their heels about re-approving our drawings now that the building is single storey. By law Council has 3 days to approve drawings but we are now at a week. Council was at a conference Thursday and Friday last week, this Wednesday was Africa Day and on and on. I am told today Thursday I can pick up the drawings at 4pm. This causes an issue as the construction team is not able to continue to work and time is being wasted!! But we hope for the best and I hope to get good news by the end of the day.

The construction team is putting the rebar or reinforcement bar together, which they have laid out in the excavated foundations, I went to take a look and check it out and it looks awesome!!! It’s really cool to see designs take shape and to see what the drawings, the math and all the years of school look like in the practical.

I went to see the head of the department of construction and he wanted me to wait 15 minutes while he looked at the drawings I wasn’t sure what 15 minutes was going to accomplish. Then he called me into his office and asked questions and made changes. This time it seems to be harder then when we put the drawings in the first time for approval! When you submit drawings you submit 4 sets, 2 for the Council, 2 for site if you want extra drawings anywhere then you submit those as well. Originally we submitted 5, 2 for them, 2 for us., 1 for me The contractor has 1 not signed by Council, which is allowed but can’t be used for construction, which he used for reference as his team had 2 onsite. I did the 4 for the library amendments as Council needs only to keep 2. When I went in this afternoon, the head of department asked me for the original drawings so he could compare them to the changes, I wanted to scream he should’ve done that before I came to collect the signed copies but also he has reminded me numerous times why Council needs 2 copies so he should have 2 sets to use and should be able to get them without asking me for some. So now I will give Council 1, site 2 and me 1 since Council can’t seem to keep the drawings they have and I am more reliable. Me being my perfectionist, work control freak self, I have a signed copy for myself, which I will bring to tomorrows meeting incase he can’t find his, which is most likely as Council is the most disorganized place I’ve been to in the government sector!!!

I went to the Council’s office Friday morning to find out…wait for it… that the original drawings weren’t approved!! They were signed but not stamped, when we submitted the drawings we also submitted an application to have the fees waived as this is a community building, this was September of last year and we were told that it would have to go through full council for a decision. There have been 2 full council sessions since then and no decision about the waiver. So I was told I’d have to wait until Monday for the head of the department to talk to the CEO of Council to ask where to go from here as we were constructing a building that technically hadn’t been approved. I had numerous questions like How did they do an inspection if the building wasn’t approved or tell us to go ahead with construction or tell us to send in changes after the building site had changed. I wanted to just yell and say all sorts of non-helpful things but I figured that wouldn’t help me at all, so instead I went to my local guy and my savior when it comes to all things work related in Zimbabwe, Willie. I went to Willie and explained the new development as he gets daily updates from me, and he was not impressed. He drove to Council during the full council meeting and pulled the head of the department out of the meeting and gave him a what for YEAH!!!! MY HERO!!! I was so proud and impressed, he asked what all the questions were about, did we miss something, what did he want. He said everything was fine and no problems he just needed to find out what to do about the drawings that weren’t approved and how to get the application waivers sorted. So 8am Monday morning I am to pick up approved drawings with no hiccups and application waivers ALL OF THEM approved and sorted. I was also concerned if they had missed our first application with 2 full councils what about the applications that were suppose to be checked during this full council!!!!

So we’ll just have wait and see what happens on Monday, although Willie is amazing I’ll believe it when Council hands me the drawings!!!!!

The last 2 weeks have been a bit scattered. I spent Easter and the following week in Harare for HIFA, which was great, however I ended up spending another week in Harare for the car. I went to pick up a friend from the airport and noticed a horrible noise the car was making. I was like something was going to fall out the bottom of the car and I could feel it in the pedals. So I called the mechanic who comes to pick up your car from wherever you are. He took it for a test drive around the block brought it back and said that it had to be towed, it wasn’t safe to drive, OOPS! So he had the car for about 10 days turns out the fan belt was destroyed as well as the tensoner, he took the suspension apart as well as I had told him I had some work done on the shocks, boots and cv joints and the shocks we sliding around and 2 of the 4 boots needed to be replaced. So I also asked for it to be serviced. Grant is who usually looks after my car, he’s good at explaining things and showing me in the car what’s wrong, he also gives me all the parts he took out and shows why they needed to be replaced. So after 2 weeks of the city I came home to Nyanga yesterday, I noticed a HUGE difference driving the car back. The last weekend I was in Harare my old roommate who now lives in Harare whom I was staying with suggested I go with her to Kariba for a break. The car’s in the shop and you need some r’n r was her rational. So I agreed. Kariba is damn that separates Zambia from Zimbabwe along the Zambezi if you go farther up the Zambezi you reach Victoria Falls. It’s not very populated and there isn’t much there but the bush. There are lodges and cabins that range from rustic to The Ritz, and by rustic I mean rustic. We were somewhere in the middle, a small cottage on the lake where the hippos came onto the front lawn to eat the grass, I could open my widows and watch them. The zebras would lay in the yards in herds and just sleep or sun bathe. When the hippos come out at night you are suppose to stay indoors as they can very vicious and can easily kill, but we just stood in the door way and they didn’t take any notice. Hippos eat 40kg of grass a day, which surprised me as I didn’t see 40kg’s worth of grass anywhere much less feed the dozen that were there. There were also crocodiles but they stayed in the lake, which is a good thing as well as loads and loads of birds. There are several little islands in the lake, one called Starvation island, which during the low season animals go out there for food but there isn’t any and they stay too long looking and when the water rises they get stuck out there and starve. In 1977 Operation Noah took place to rescue all the animals off the islands back to the main land so they could eat, some mother’s of animals killed their young to save them as they didn’t understand what was going on, everyone once in a while still today small rescues are done. Kariba is very hot, one of the hottest places in Zimbabwe but as we are heading into winter I found it as hot as the rest of Zimbabwe is during the summer plus there was a breeze.

The good news, no GREAT news is that excavations are finished AND site inspection was approved!!!!! I didn’t have any doubts about the quality of work or if it was right but I did have concerns on how long it would take to get the inspector to site and if he would want a bribe to pass us BUT it was all fine and we are now moving on to the pouring of footings, rebar and foundations.