Sunday, April 29, 2018

Lots of paperwork...


Saturday & Sunday, April 28-29, 2018

I’ve had some very pleasant days doing the same thing over and over again—the wash, which I for some reason feel great pleasure in doing, my bowl of cereal for lunch (feeding my addiction to cold cereal). I even found one of my favorites at the grocery store—a smashed-up box, but tasted the same anyway, and overpriced, as all things American are in grocery stores meant for Europeans and Americans.  I have been reading my books, watching TV (they have an amazing variety of shows and movies here at this hotel), and working on reports and organizing the hundreds of pictures I always seem to collect while traveling.  I do this while Jim is out there hiking and sweating and being exhausted in the awful heat and humidity (someone has to do it, so it might as well be him).  But in truth he keeps telling me to stay back and he is always glad after a long day that I did—the hikes are not easy, slipping over rocks, going way down and then way back up again.  You can see by the pictures, especially here in Freetown, the rocky hills and valleys they live and carry their water around in.  The people here in Africa are as sure-footed as any in the world that live in these conditions.


A rocky, hilly area, all over Freetown.   


                                                         
Try carrying a bucket on your head over a wobbly bridge…

Today Jim is home with me, having completed looking and being here a little longer than necessary, but then we will get lots of our work done here before we return and have other things on our jetlagged minds.  Yesterday they saw 15 sites, so it was a long, hard day, but it is finished.  Today he is working on his reports from yesterday’s looking.  These are possible projects that we might put into our current water budget for this year.  Since there will probably only be about 4-6 that we will request to do for this year, we can keep others in mind for another year’s budget.
One of the places he saw had a bunch of large poly tanks with taps at the bottom, spaced along one road, and put in by UNICEF.  The community asked them to place these with the intent that GUMA (government) water would fill them.  GUMA only has one truck to fill tanks in the whole area.  We did an area project and even they say that sometimes the truck never comes—the truck might be broken or they can’t get water either.  We thought that we might redo a pump here so that we could distribute water lines to all of these tanks and keep them filled.



We’ll give you tanks; maybe someone will fill them for you!

Other projects that they looked at were sometimes disappointing because of the lack of action by a community.  One group had a 10-year old well with a hand pump that has been broken for a year.  They figured that the only problem was that the pump rod was broken, an easy, cheap fix.  A year?  They were even collecting money there, so why not fix it?  They fixed it once a year before, but didn’t care enough to fix it this time?  Other places we hesitate to work in are those that are filthy or people are fighting.  We know they don’t have many places that collect trash, but we have also seen communities that have the same amount of trash, but they don’t throw it everywhere and still manage to keep the place clean.  Even though we sometimes don’t want to do a project in a dirty area, we do have proof that if you go back again and again they can learn to keep the place clean.  This happened at L/G.  It used to be full of garbage but now, through Brother Thomas’s work, it is a clean place.  These communities will be required to donate 20% of the cost of the project.  If they earn their money and get a bank account, we will do one for them.  We can always do more of the likeable projects in future years.  These people generally have more money than they do in village district areas, where we are requiring 10%.  We will have people hired like Brother Thomas, to keep visiting them, but we want to be sure before we do a project, the possibility of them keeping it up so we don’t have problems later. 


We can ask them to clean up their trash and they will, but as soon as the project is done, it will look like this again, unless we have a Brother Thomas to keep after them…

We are pleased that almost all but one area in the present project are working correctly, but much of that has to do with Brother Thomas’s dogged determination, visiting them twice a month for the past several months.  There are two communities that we will write a letter for requiring them to split their committees when people can’t agree.  Then they will do better on their own and not be drug down by another group that doesn’t work to keep their donation viable.  Why they need an official letter we do not know, but we drafted one that we e-mailed to Brother Thomas to help a couple of the communities out.  We are pleased to be working with such an effective monitor.  We will also be trying out John Conteh, our driver, who also has done work for the church before, as another contractor on this project.  We will give him one to see if we like his work.  He might also work for less than our present contractor, but then a lower price doesn’t always equal good work.  We shall see. 
Our Area Welfare Manager in Accra for the last several years has been John Buah.  He is the loveliest man and is also a Stake Patriarch.  He finally gets to retire in a few days, even though he’d hope to a few months ago but they couldn’t find his replacement.  We found out that our old AWM, Daniel Yirenya is taking his place.  Daniel has been serving as an Area 70, the ones that serve for about 8 years and then get released.  Others serve for a lifetime, the first quorum of 70.  He just got released and is back at his old job.  We wondered who it might be.  Now we know. 

We had John and Lionel visit us to get paid for the work that they have done for us this week.  We will be working with them yet again.  We really like these pleasant young men.  We are on the home stretch now, but we have a lot of paperwork and figuring to do in the next few days here at the hotel, and of course, Church tomorrow.

Sunday


John picked us up to take us to his Ward, a short distance from the hotel.  Our old friend Marcus is the Bishop there, and he was being released because he is now the Stake President.  So during Sacrament meeting they heard who their new Bishopric was and several of them spoke.  Sunday school was normal and the third hour was a CD training that was apparently prepared by the Ghana Area Presidency about how to mentor, how to do councils, etc.  Then they had a discussion.  For some reason they started this about 20 minutes late, so the meeting lasted another half hour longer.  It was not so hot today and sitting under the fan was helpful, but we were both still sleepy, me especially.  It is hard to hear what they are saying both in translation (accent) and their soft voices and the bad PA system.  We both fell asleep after we got back to the hotel.  Then we continued working on reports and Jim had to decipher which projects we might want to do for this year here in Freetown.  One more day of working, which will be nice to get completed before heading back to Accra on Tuesday.  

No comments:

Post a Comment