13 September 2015

13 September 2015 09:21 AM

The renovations are moving forward although slower than promised or expected so I am feeling anxious about the time remaining and finances to cover what is still undone.  There are several jobs that R, Erick’s contractor friend, has started and I have paid for but that have not been finished…or even worked on for several weeks now.  I think he has too many contracting jobs going on all at once in too many locations.     On the positive side, we have received quite a number of donations toward the work and we have been thanking God for them…otherwise we would never have started doing any renovation work at all.

Seeing changes in process has really motivated the staff.  Most of them have really been catching the “vision” and are working hard to help out where they can.  Sometimes their enthusiasm has even caused them to rush in too quickly.    For example, last week they started whitewashing the outside of the main building. After 2 days I thought we needed more help so I hired my employee Fred and his brother Kennedy to come and help.  Fred discovered that no one had thought to scrape the old whitewash off first so it all had to be scraped off and re-done…2 days of work for nothing, not to mention a waste of whitewash.   Several things like that have happened; which is frustrating, BUT all the interior painting should be finished by Thursday and then we start the clean-up.

Accommodation is still not firmly set.   If all of the delegates were singles there would not have been a problem but there are 5 delegate couples and 3 of those have children and nannies too.    Erick was able to get the WEMA house for us to rent for the families & nannies.    

 They normally charge 20’000ksh per day for the 4-bedroom house but they finally agreed to rent it to us for 250’000ksh for the 6 weeks; which is still 200ksh per person per day above our budget.    Then, on Thursday night  2 of the families wrote to say they would not be coming this year  so on Friday, Fridah and I sat and rethought the whole ‘who can stay where’ issue and decided to cancel WEMA and put all 11 single men off base in dorms and all couples/families on base ---buy 3 couples beds and still save ourselves 180’000ksh.   So, I told Erick to cancel WEMA.  Then Saturday night I get an e-mail from Garry saying that he told the couples to reconsider and come anyway------I am stressed!!    The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.