That is a lot of paint!!!!
This has been a full week and many things I think are worth sharing both from the standpoint of what it takes to do things here or slightly humorous. So basically this will more than likely be a long blog.
As I mentioned a couple of blogs ago, I will be moving out to the site to live in the small building we have on site. First the building needs some work and I will have to build my furniture like a bed, chairs and table. So after getting back from Arusha and some and lots of good work there including tracking down some safety equipment and a folding 20 foot ladder, I had to get busy and start buying items not only for my house but also for the projects going on this month as money had arrived on Mpesa for me to use in getting those items purchased.
The site projects I had to buy for included the Ward building's bath house and latrine which included a full variety of materials but started with inspecting the doors I had paid to have made before I left for Nairobi. Next up is the cistern painting project, both inside and outside including cleaning materials which lead me to the latest greatest invention to arrive in Singida this month-the squeeze mop. Last of the site projects currently planned for the month were fixing the guttering system installed on all the buildings last year. Unfortunately the contractors hired did not really know anything about guttering and used all the wrong downspouts, downspout piping and connectors so they leaked horribly. This was one of the first things I had to report on arriving here in January during the middle of rainy season was how we needed to replace a large part of the system as well as paint the fascia boards they were attached to (many fundi's think a primer coat is a paint coat).
What does all this mean-a total of 10 stores involved, having the wood cut and planed, the doors made and inspected, four different storage areas to store everything and having it all ready to go on the day you get the truck lined up. Again this time it was a Lori type truck but we pretty much filled it up. A little more on getting wood cut and planed, here when you go buy wood it is in a basic size-1x8 which is really 1 1/2 x 8 x 13-18 feet long depending on where it was broken or split. You first have to choose your raw boards then carry them to the woodworker next door and explain what cuts you ant. It is unfortunately not like most places where I had them a couple of 1x8 and say I need 3 each 1x4 and 2 each 1x2 and they figure out how to cut that for you. Here you have to mark the boards for them to understand what they can get out of a board. In the end after spending 2 hours there we had all the boards cut and taken back to the storage facility to wait for the truck the next morning.
Monday morning rolls around and we get the truck, the cement, the 20 foot lengths of pipe, the gutter fittings, the cut and planed wood, the paint (roughly 200 liters of paint), the doors, the ladder, misc hardware and tools, my new mattress, my new gas tank and cook top, pots and pans. It took roughly 2 hours to make stops at all four places and load up the materials then the drive out takes about 2 hours followed by only three of us to unload everything and store it on site. After than I started working on cleaning the outside of the tank.
To clean the tank would have been so easy with a pressure washer but I don't even have a hose with pressure on it. so basically I took two small bottles and would fill them from the large bucket of water and cleaner mix and would pour the first on the surface to wet the area for me to scrub by hand. Then the second bottle to rinse what I just cleaned. This took the rest of the day until early evening stopping at about 7 PM normal time. (normal time is the local time as we know it and not Swahili time which is off by 6 hours and has four time sections in a day instead of two) I got about 70% of the tank scrubbed by then.
The next morning I was to go meet up with William at the rabies clinic site. He had given me the directions for which buses to take but no times and of course there is no cell phone reception between the two of us in these locations. So I assume it will be the normal bus time at 7 am so I get up at 5:30 and hike to the bus stand at the balboa tree. After about 10 minutes the bus ticket sales man gets there and he informs me the bus I want does not come through until 2 PM. Then I get a message from William telling me he just found that out and there are no rooms at the rabies clinic site for me to stay overnight. So I march back to the FDM site. Change back to my work clothes and start cleaning the rest of the tank finished with throwing buckets of clean water on the face of the walls.
Then to painting. Maybe now is the time to say the exterior surface of the tank is roughly 600 square feet. Again the previous paint job looked more like a primer coat and was basically worn to the point of not having any paint. So a minimum of three coats of oil based paint (yes oil based-they have very little to offer in water based actually available and no primers to switch between oil and water based paints you can actually get your hands on).
That filled the rest of my Tuesday up but it was greatly enhanced by the new ladder which I folded into a scaffold for the top 4 feet of the tank. I also did this Wednesday all day and the first part of Thursday. Thursday afternoon I decided to attack the fact that we did have a major rainstorm here just before I arrived and some water was in the tank.
Maybe now is a good time to discuss the temperature, which worried William greatly that I was doing all this in the full heat. It was hot, but not nearly as bad as a South Carolina summer. It was probably in the upper 90s and very bright sun bearing down. Mosquitoes were not so bad right now but sand fleas were horrible (Camp Lejune type horrible). I did polish off 4 bottles of water a day though as I tried to make sure I was hydrated with the dry atmosphere making it hard to tell if I was actually sweating a lot of the time.
Cleaning out the inside of the tank required using a cup to fill up a larger bucket that I then carried up a ladder and threw onto the grass from the roof of the tank. It took 39 buckets just smaller than 5 gallons to get enough water out to start dealing with the mud and muck on the bottom that collects from the roof and gutters. I was using the new wonderful squeeze mop here which did help when the water got to low to get up by cup, but quickly tore up as I tried to move the muck around. Then I just used the head and did it by hand. Two buckets of mud and muck and I felt I had it clean looking enough to let it dry out and then see where it stands. So it will do that over the weekend.
That evening I started painting the top of the tank but it got dark so I quit. Next morning I was back at the top of the tank and managed two coats one in the morning and one in the afternoon with a break to do the accounting work necessary for these projects as well as the on site money distributions for the fundi work on the ward bath house/latrine and purchasing local materials such as bricks, rock and sand.
In the end I never got to work on my house or any of my furniture. I did get to wash my clothes a couple of times. This is done by putting the clothes in a bucket or wash basin with water and throwing in some hand washing soap and letting it fizzle a little then reaching in by hand and agitating the clothes and water to properly get all the dirt out then rinsing the clothes in another bucket of clean water, ringing them out of all the water you can and hanging them up. Remember sometimes as I talk about these things that most folks have cell phones, some have satellite tv, many have smart phones. The technology disparity sometimes really strikes me. Especially when I see the brick hauler with his donkey and bull pulled cart talking on his cell phone.
It was good I never got to my house because William bought some chickens that he had to store in the structure so no animals would eat them and then a local herder drove some of his animals on FDM property without permission so they had to get the local government authority involved, Irastus (I think I spelled that right). The family will get fined as part of a program to protect crops from cattle and goat herds. In the mean time we had to store the goats on site overnight so they were put into my future house as well-guess I need to buy some air freshener now.
As I mentioned a couple of blogs ago, I will be moving out to the site to live in the small building we have on site. First the building needs some work and I will have to build my furniture like a bed, chairs and table. So after getting back from Arusha and some and lots of good work there including tracking down some safety equipment and a folding 20 foot ladder, I had to get busy and start buying items not only for my house but also for the projects going on this month as money had arrived on Mpesa for me to use in getting those items purchased.
The site projects I had to buy for included the Ward building's bath house and latrine which included a full variety of materials but started with inspecting the doors I had paid to have made before I left for Nairobi. Next up is the cistern painting project, both inside and outside including cleaning materials which lead me to the latest greatest invention to arrive in Singida this month-the squeeze mop. Last of the site projects currently planned for the month were fixing the guttering system installed on all the buildings last year. Unfortunately the contractors hired did not really know anything about guttering and used all the wrong downspouts, downspout piping and connectors so they leaked horribly. This was one of the first things I had to report on arriving here in January during the middle of rainy season was how we needed to replace a large part of the system as well as paint the fascia boards they were attached to (many fundi's think a primer coat is a paint coat).
What does all this mean-a total of 10 stores involved, having the wood cut and planed, the doors made and inspected, four different storage areas to store everything and having it all ready to go on the day you get the truck lined up. Again this time it was a Lori type truck but we pretty much filled it up. A little more on getting wood cut and planed, here when you go buy wood it is in a basic size-1x8 which is really 1 1/2 x 8 x 13-18 feet long depending on where it was broken or split. You first have to choose your raw boards then carry them to the woodworker next door and explain what cuts you ant. It is unfortunately not like most places where I had them a couple of 1x8 and say I need 3 each 1x4 and 2 each 1x2 and they figure out how to cut that for you. Here you have to mark the boards for them to understand what they can get out of a board. In the end after spending 2 hours there we had all the boards cut and taken back to the storage facility to wait for the truck the next morning.
Monday morning rolls around and we get the truck, the cement, the 20 foot lengths of pipe, the gutter fittings, the cut and planed wood, the paint (roughly 200 liters of paint), the doors, the ladder, misc hardware and tools, my new mattress, my new gas tank and cook top, pots and pans. It took roughly 2 hours to make stops at all four places and load up the materials then the drive out takes about 2 hours followed by only three of us to unload everything and store it on site. After than I started working on cleaning the outside of the tank.
To clean the tank would have been so easy with a pressure washer but I don't even have a hose with pressure on it. so basically I took two small bottles and would fill them from the large bucket of water and cleaner mix and would pour the first on the surface to wet the area for me to scrub by hand. Then the second bottle to rinse what I just cleaned. This took the rest of the day until early evening stopping at about 7 PM normal time. (normal time is the local time as we know it and not Swahili time which is off by 6 hours and has four time sections in a day instead of two) I got about 70% of the tank scrubbed by then.
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| lower area cleaned with black above yet to clean |
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| pour water and cleaner from small bottle |
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| hand scrub with brush |
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| new area just cleaned |
The next morning I was to go meet up with William at the rabies clinic site. He had given me the directions for which buses to take but no times and of course there is no cell phone reception between the two of us in these locations. So I assume it will be the normal bus time at 7 am so I get up at 5:30 and hike to the bus stand at the balboa tree. After about 10 minutes the bus ticket sales man gets there and he informs me the bus I want does not come through until 2 PM. Then I get a message from William telling me he just found that out and there are no rooms at the rabies clinic site for me to stay overnight. So I march back to the FDM site. Change back to my work clothes and start cleaning the rest of the tank finished with throwing buckets of clean water on the face of the walls.
Then to painting. Maybe now is the time to say the exterior surface of the tank is roughly 600 square feet. Again the previous paint job looked more like a primer coat and was basically worn to the point of not having any paint. So a minimum of three coats of oil based paint (yes oil based-they have very little to offer in water based actually available and no primers to switch between oil and water based paints you can actually get your hands on).
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| Did I mention how much I love my new ladder |
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| 1st coat area on left, second coat on right |
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| painting the base |
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| finished product |
That filled the rest of my Tuesday up but it was greatly enhanced by the new ladder which I folded into a scaffold for the top 4 feet of the tank. I also did this Wednesday all day and the first part of Thursday. Thursday afternoon I decided to attack the fact that we did have a major rainstorm here just before I arrived and some water was in the tank.
Maybe now is a good time to discuss the temperature, which worried William greatly that I was doing all this in the full heat. It was hot, but not nearly as bad as a South Carolina summer. It was probably in the upper 90s and very bright sun bearing down. Mosquitoes were not so bad right now but sand fleas were horrible (Camp Lejune type horrible). I did polish off 4 bottles of water a day though as I tried to make sure I was hydrated with the dry atmosphere making it hard to tell if I was actually sweating a lot of the time.
Cleaning out the inside of the tank required using a cup to fill up a larger bucket that I then carried up a ladder and threw onto the grass from the roof of the tank. It took 39 buckets just smaller than 5 gallons to get enough water out to start dealing with the mud and muck on the bottom that collects from the roof and gutters. I was using the new wonderful squeeze mop here which did help when the water got to low to get up by cup, but quickly tore up as I tried to move the muck around. Then I just used the head and did it by hand. Two buckets of mud and muck and I felt I had it clean looking enough to let it dry out and then see where it stands. So it will do that over the weekend.
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| selfie getting the water out |
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| the water at the bottom of the tank |
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| this is a reflection of the clouds and opening in the water at the bottom of the tank |
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| the mop when working |
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| the mop when it was not |
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| mud and muck |
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| a fairly clean bottom of the tank |
That evening I started painting the top of the tank but it got dark so I quit. Next morning I was back at the top of the tank and managed two coats one in the morning and one in the afternoon with a break to do the accounting work necessary for these projects as well as the on site money distributions for the fundi work on the ward bath house/latrine and purchasing local materials such as bricks, rock and sand.
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| Yes I was smart enough to paint myself back to the ladder |
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| the view from the top of the tank makes it worthwhile |
In the end I never got to work on my house or any of my furniture. I did get to wash my clothes a couple of times. This is done by putting the clothes in a bucket or wash basin with water and throwing in some hand washing soap and letting it fizzle a little then reaching in by hand and agitating the clothes and water to properly get all the dirt out then rinsing the clothes in another bucket of clean water, ringing them out of all the water you can and hanging them up. Remember sometimes as I talk about these things that most folks have cell phones, some have satellite tv, many have smart phones. The technology disparity sometimes really strikes me. Especially when I see the brick hauler with his donkey and bull pulled cart talking on his cell phone.
 |
| washing clothes |
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| brick hauler |
It was good I never got to my house because William bought some chickens that he had to store in the structure so no animals would eat them and then a local herder drove some of his animals on FDM property without permission so they had to get the local government authority involved, Irastus (I think I spelled that right). The family will get fined as part of a program to protect crops from cattle and goat herds. In the mean time we had to store the goats on site overnight so they were put into my future house as well-guess I need to buy some air freshener now.
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| rats chewed my bolt container lids because they were previously peanut butter contianers |
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| trying to organize the tool room |
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| bath house floor strainer and Geiltrap installed |
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| shower drain pipes |
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| the collective of shower drain pipes to the latrine hole |
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| sunset |
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| goats being stored in my house |
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| trying to herd goats into my house |
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| morning sunrise on Saturday |
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| Friday night sunset over school |
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