Broken and restored in three days time

All right, I've finally got some time here to lay out what happened over the last three days of construction:

Tuesday: The Day of the Crane

So, as I said on Monday, Tuesday was a critical day. We had this crane, which they were renting by the hour, so we wanted to get its part done as quickly as possible. The crane arrived on time, and they attached the hooks to the containers they were supposed to lift. As this was happening, we were readying the materials to level the footings under each container corner. So far, so good.

Then, the crane operator lifted the containers. Everything held together well, and I was in charge of building the supports so I got busy working in the back corner. As we finished that support, apparently the crane operator decided he needed to shift something, and in the process the back part of the building descended onto the support, simultaneously separating the three containers from each other.

At this point, what we had hoped would be a simple matter of the crane lifting the two attached containers simultaneously while we fixed the supports had now become three completely independent containers we were going to have to lift one by one, fit back together, and level to each other... wow.

And so that's what we did. The team leader spent most of the morning dealing with 3 different people telling him what we should have done. They were:

1. The project manager with Living Hope, a man who is apparently a nice guy but who we always dreaded seeing on site because we knew it would mean several shouts of "Time is money!" and the revelation of materials he had that would have made whatever we spent the last three hours on markedly easier.

2. Arthur, the man from the Cape Town Health Department who was relatively quiet but his presence always put the Living Hope guy on edge.

3. The man who drew the plans for what we were doing, an 83-year-old widower who I called Old Man River.

Eventually this trio left, and we were finally able to get some work done. The crane was on site for about 3 hours longer than anticipated, something we were worried about because they made it sound like this thing cost a fortune, and our frame of reference reinforced that. Imagine how hard we laughed that night when it was revealed the crane and two operators cost $40/hour.

Wednesday: Picking up the pieces
Part of the destruction of Tuesday was the loss of the front door to the clinic, which we replaced before leaving but didn't have the materials to install the handle. As such, I spent the first half of Wednesday digging out the handle portion of said door. Meanwhile everyone else spent the morning getting ready to install the beam for our new roof, and they got it up in time for me to spend the afternoon working on top of the containers, installing supports for the rafters.

We needed to get the rafters up before the end of the day because leaving materials around the job site was not an option: anything left around Red Hill gets used on someone's house in short order. Early in the afternoon I was not feeling good about getting it all done, but our local help stepped up big time and we were back to The Team House just an hour later than planned.

Thursday: Redemption
Our overall goal for Thursday was to get the sheets of tin roof installed on the rafters. We got off to a slow start when the big three stopped by and Old Man River started telling us everything that wasn't right. He would stand over on the side looking disapprovingly and I'd look at Ethan and say "Looks like Old Man River's about to strike," and then he'd call over the Living Hope guy, who would then tell us what should be happening.

Again, we were able to get real work done when they left. I was put in charge of getting the tin installed, and I spent the afternoon crawling around on the rafters and drilling it all down. I may have put myself in some of the more reckless positions I've ever been, but we got it all done, again thanks to the local guys who were helping us. Getting that last piece on was just an awesome feeling.

We followed up the end of our time in Red Hill with a community party, where the kids club sang, the youth choir sang, the audience sang a couple of African hymns and we served 200 frankly awful looking hot dogs.

And now we've spent today (Friday) touring around Cape Town a bit more, visiting the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, the Malay district (where Malaysian slaves used to live and now all the buildings are brightly colored), the District 6 Apartheid museum, and Signal Mountain.

This is all a bit disjointed, and for that I apologize. But I'll close this post with the news that I've discovered the joys of Pineapple Fanta on this trip, and I don't think my life can be the same.