We found the answer to the trouble with the 2mm difference on the brick height. There is a king pin or roller pin that is on the arm that compresses the bricks. This roller is what keeps the lid down and holds everything together. 1 side of the pin was so warn it wasn’t rolling anymore and wasn’t compressing its side of the lid. We had a new one made and installed and TA DA the bricks are now even!!!! So I’ve been going randomly during the day and measuring bricks to check size and consistency and so far so good. The foundation is still slow and they are still working on the west side but now that they know what they are doing, there is now a rhythm and moving at a steady pace. We are still dealing with rebar issues but I am hoping tomorrow or Friday IT WILL BE SORTED! A shipment of science equipment, textbooks, reference books and wait for it… LIBRARY BOOKS came in from the UK. A brilliant NGO called School AID sent a shipment from schools across the country. My job was to go through the books and sort them and find out what was there. There was everything from reference books, to encyclopedia’s to children’s novels, readers, classics like Bronte and Jane Austen and every John Grisham book ever written. Some of them I started flipping through and got caught up reading them, this was an issue for me when I worked in the public library and had to put books back on shelves, I get caught up in books that an hour would pass and someone would come looking for me thinking I had died, blame it on my parents and their love of reading. So now we have to finish the library so we can put these books on shelves and out to the public. It was a good day!!!

So the cost of food has gone up in Zimbabwe, which is hard as people’s wages haven’t/ have gone up. The NEC has increased the wage 17.65% across the board, but this doesn’t work for beggars, guys who sell goes on the road, in the parking lots and domestic staff. This is for the “workforce”. But a litre of juice is $2.50, a litre of milk is $1.50 and veggies have just gone up. So my drink repertoire now consists of coffee and water. My veggie intake in Canada has always been great, I’m a huge fan of salad and at university had 1 a day as well as a veggie with dinner. Here in Zimbabwe with ZESA cuts veggies last a week. Since I grocery shop once a month living in a rural area my veggie intake happens at the beginning of the month, I freeze a few veggies for the end of the month for my left over chili the last 4 days of the month. Luckily this month ZESA has been a bit better then usual, why I don’t ask I am just thankful so my veggies have lasted 2 weeks. The network (phone and internet) has been horrid with the weather (rain, grey sky, clouds, and VERY WINDY) and I’m from BC so I know windy. It’s actually a miracle that we’ve had power but satellites and cables and all that communication technical stuff has just been non-existent.

I spent part of the morning on site meeting with the contractor dealing with issues like the drainage, rebar and windows. So my rebar issue is now SOLVED!! But we now just need to make it work with the budget, that’s a lot harder then it sounds trust me. There is a reason I didn’t become an accountant but maybe I should’ve taken some classes. This is also the reason that companies have many people on a project, each with their own specialty, which makes sense. I just keep telling myself this is ALL LEARNING!