Salut!
(As we say in rather familiar French)
Speaking of French, the more lessons I have the worse it seems to get. I get a lot more blank looks now than I did when I first came over.
John blames it on my NZ accent (??)
We started today really positively.
Our guys were almost all working away when we arrived. The site seems more productive, and the guys are a lot more enthusiastic and much more focused on their tasks. Sure, we still have frustrations and hassles but things do seem to be going a lot better.
Ironic really given that Ali, the foreman, hasn’t been here for a week and has not been replaced.
We still don’t have the additional guys that were promised on Monday but we do have stockpiles of cement, sand a gravel so we’re part way there.
The first wall section has been stripped and looks pretty good- see photo XXXX
Our night shift are still trucking along making life easier for the day time drainage crew. We’ve installed the first main line under the cool store area.
I made the mistake of saying how well everything was going and that it would probably turn to shit in the afternoon.
Well, it did!
But not how I expected.
We were sitting in the smoko room having a luxurious lunch of crab and lobster pate with baguettes, when the news came through from our surveyors wife of gunfire around the presidential palace.
This is around 6km from site.
I Then called our security people, and they confirmed that the gunfire may have been part of either an attempted military coup, or an opposition attempt to seize control from President Tandja.
Anyway, we made appropriate phone calls and then sat tight on site monitoring the situation.
At around 4pm I decided to close the site down and send the guys home. Once they’d all gone we packed up all our food/water and other useful gear and drove to the villas. On the way, we passed by the end of the airport runway where the president’s plane is stored in a large hangar. There were two helicopters circling this at a very low altitude and a small armoured vehicle turned off in front of us and went tearing down a side road.
Other than that, there’s not much sign of any military activity.
In fact all the police seem to have buggered off somewhere as well.
We got back to villa 1 and Stan and Lindsay went to villa 2 for a quick shower and to get their gear before returning.
We’re all now safely ensconced at villa 1 with our sat phones, a heap of food and water and we’ll wait to see what happens over the next few hours.
I’ve also got the car here so that if we do have to leave, we have the means to do so.
I’m hoping this will all be over fairly quickly and we’ll probably be back at work tomorrow.
As you’ll be aware, there are conflicting stories about what’s going on.
One the one hand the president has been fatally wounded/is being held with a number of ministers and the opposition/military have taken over.
On the other hand, the opposition/some breakaway military people attempted a coup and failed.
Either way, we’ll be sitting tight here for now waiting to see what happens.
These will only be on in an emergency. At the moment all our other numbers are still working plus as you can see, we still have internet.
Bye for now,
Me
