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.

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.

I go grocery shopping once a month. One big shop then I don’t have to worry about making sure I get into town or running out. I seem to have a good idea of what is needed in a month. So it is now at the end of the month and there are veggies left in the fridge that are on their last leg and need to be used so I have come up with an idea called “Left over chili”. Left over chili is the usual ground beef, tomato sauce, beans’n sauce and all the left over veg in my fridge. It turned out really well although there was an unimaginable amount of green string beans and carrots, but now I have loads of iron and good night vision!

ZESA for the first time this evening went out for a usual 4.5 hour stint. 5pm it went out, 9:30 it came back. Luckily for the first hour I was in a meeting, then I was able to work until my computer battery died, then I made dinner on the propane tank.

My “To Do” list is now numbered and the numbers are distributed evenly among the days. Lots of the numbers span over a few days and some I think will never get ticked off the list, it also doesn’t help that the list keeps getting longer!!!

We are now working on the game plan of what’s going on inside the building. The various ideas are becoming more concrete and various competitions to decorate the building. This should have been done before the building was designed but here in Zimbabwe things happen differently. I’m surprised I’m the one putting together this game plan, but it’s been good experience and interesting.

Another new thing we thought to try is mixing our Bamba brick system with a Hydraform. The design and strength of the Bamba system with the ease of construction of the Hydraform to create an iron brick that you can turn out 1000 a day versus the 100 a day with just the Bamba. The Hydraform usually doesn’t include cement in the mix and doesn’t provide the interlocking system of Bamba. So we’ll see what turns out. One small step for Meredith, one GIANT step for the construction brick making community.

I’m listening to classical music while trying to fix the library plans AGAIN! Finally after 2 weeks of daily conversations with different Council members in the construction department and mini visits to site where they walk around but don’t do anything, yesterday they FINALLY put in the pegs. However, the pegs they put in were not at the original location. The previous pegs, were not permanent and have since disappeared. The new pegs are permanent but not the location of the last pegs, so my site changed in all the wrong places. So I had to re-draw the site plan AND try to design a building that fits into the space. So I’m very lucky that ZESA (power) has decided to stick around so I can do all these drawings. Then having to talk to various people to get their input and opinions and doing different options to see what different things look like, it’s almost like starting from scratch. I thought we had this all sorted but I guess that’s not the case. I was going to ask for a variance to encroach on the boundary line by 500mm but it would take until June when all of Council has their quarterly meeting to get approved and we can’t wait that long. So we make the changes and send Council the amendments package, which they won’t read but approve, which is fine with me. The head of the construction department yesterday told me after he finished the pegging that he didn’t want to see me until the job was done. I laughed and said I would see him when I needed his help.

We continue to come up with new ideas for the resource center and all the things it could be used for and what we want in it. A big thing is that there is nothing to do here in Nyanga, if you want to go out, meet friends, whatever there is no movie theatre, no coffee shop, no take out, if you want to eat out, you go to one of the hotel or resorts in the area. We are thinking of ways to keep people entertained, out of trouble and something to keep them stimulated and something unique. The existing library is to be used for conferences, meetings, etc. but what about when there isn’t any. We wondered about making it a art gallery. There is currently a wee bathroom with a storage room around it that we are thinking of converting into a kitchen or even better a small canteen or coffee stall. From there sandwich’s, coffee, snacks whatever could be sold, bring your computer, look at some art and it’s a cooler version of Starbucks! It also means that people in the library don’t have to leave to eat. There isn’t anything like this in the area. If I was a student from 100km down the dirt road and I came on a Saturday for the library and computer room, I’d like to eat and have coffee. Also we thought of maybe having a big backdrop or screen to show movies, both educational and entertainment and then during meetings or conferences you could plug your computer in and run a slide show. This would give Nyanga a social life or weekend life outside of drinking and just hanging out in the bush doing nothing. This is one of the exciting parts of my job that I enjoy. We also thought of having the students paint inside the children’s area and part of the outside of building like a mural to give it a unique look to it, plus if students from all 70 schools were involved it would add to the community of the building