Sorry it’s taken a month to update this blog. Things have been picking up and gaining speed. The walls are going up and there are gaps in the walls for the windows and doors and the shuttering (wooden outline) for the arch is being constructed. Minor changes to the building have been made here and there as we go through construction and learning things and discover things about the building. The bricks are manually made, which we have discovered is both a curse and a blessing. The curse is that each brick has to be made perfect or they don’t lock into place like Lego like they should and we run into trouble. The blessing is the mould is brilliant, the bricks are big and thick and sturdy, they have 2 holes going from top to bottom in order to put plumbing and electrical through and any other cables, they don’t need mortar to put them together just click them together and as it is meant to be easy ANYONE CAN DO IT! Theoretically. The clicking mechanism is a brilliant idea… but that’s the issue it’s brilliant in theory. Using humans always creates room for human error. We’re all new at this technology and it’s take months to learn the pros and cons, the benefits and weaknesses. The machine has caused us issues and we contacted someone in South Africa who has used this technology for years and he has had none of our issues. This leads us to believe it’s a “Friday machine”. A Friday machine is built on a Friday when factory workers are thinking about the weekend and not about their job so it tends to have issues. Our bricks are 20% thicker than they are meant to, which means more material and the brick isn’t balanced as it should be structural-wise. The bricks made by men aren’t perfect every time so they don’t all fit perfectly together so the construction workers have to chip away at the bricks to make them fit, this was causing HUGE time delays. So we decided to go against the design and put in some mortar on the top and bottom of the bricks so that the bricks would “click” together and not have to be chipped away saving time. There would still be no mortar on the sides and that has worker out brilliant. In the day and a half they’ve been back from their break huge strides have been made. We might actually finish this building in the 6 weeks I have left here. The weather is getting hotter, which means thunder storms, which I love but zesa does not and we are getting more power cuts. Last week I had 30 hours straight of no power, not thunder storm related just luck of the draw. But all over the country has had bad power in the last few weeks so maybe we’re due for a few days or weeks of good power or that’s just wishful thinking on my part.