welding burn/sunburn

This last week was an interesting mix of items.  I spent a lot of my week trying to get the site ready for my absence while I head home to the States awaiting my work/residence permit renewal process to be completed.  But every time I started working on a project, one of the staff would bring something over and ask me to work on it.  Most of the items were personal and not things belonging to the site.  Most notable of those came from one of our nurses, Emmanuel.  He wanted to build a window for his house out of the scrap wood I keep on site (never throw it away unless it is bad).  I found it funny how he knew the piece of wood on top and bottom needed to be long enough to exceed the opening.  This way they can put masonry grout between the bricks and the wood along the edges.  What was funny was he had no idea how to figure out how long they should be.  Understand this is someone who has done high school, the two extra years of high school and nurses college (probably a year or two extra here).  But he could not figure out that you take the opening width add the width of BOTH boards on each side and then the amount you want it to extend on EACH side.   When he finally caught on I was adding those things to his opening he only wanted add one side of the window and not both.  What kind of math do they teach here?  I walked him through building the window and how to drill the holes to put his “security bars” through.  Again, he wanted to cut them the exact width of the opening (inside of the opening) and I had to explain they had to be long enough to extend into the wood on both sides.  He finally gave up at this point and I did the measurement for him and showed him how to drill both sides and slide it through.  Here he is with his completed window.

This week I also got to use one of the new tools sent over with the team last year that Mr. Campbell bought for us.  The pipe bender made a much easier job of building the sign our district medical office has required we install along the road.  It has been a while since I have used a pipe bender so the first bend was a little off the mark but still worked.  The second bend was on the money with my mark falling dead center in the curve.  I then welded some small pieces of flat bar and drilled through to attach a piece of sheet metal that will be the sign.  I decided to use bolts instead of rivets because I may have to take it apart to send it to a sign painter since William cannot find the guy who paints all the signs here in the valley.

the chalk mark is a little off center

got it right the second time

I also got to install the cubby shelf I built a week ago for patient record books in the medical clinic.

On a note concerning the need for the toolboxes so they will quit moving things around is that when things are moved constantly they break.  This happened to my welding hood.  I can fix it now that I know about it and can buy the replacement part in town.  But I needed to do some welding this week.  So I used the welding goggles to protect my eyes and a really thick layer of sunscreen.  The result was sunburn from the welding arc all over my face bad enough I wanted to hide in the dark the next day.  When I got into town everyone took one look and asked what happened so it was apparently noticeable.