Morning all,
Its Friday morning here, and a day slightly holier than the rest of the week in the eyes of Islam so I’m typing away in our living room listening to the Mullahs (Muslim town criers) trying to out cry each other. Not sure why they had to start at 4:30am, maybe Allah doesn’t like people sleeping, and likes to wake everyone up early to get in a full day of lounging around under trees.
I managed to get all 50.6 kg of luggage through to Niamey you’ll be pleased to hear. Air France have changed their rules and now allow 2 pieces of luggage weighing a maximum of 23kg each. Unfortunately, mine were more than this so I had to pay 100 euro but thought that was pretty cheap given how much it would have cost to courier stuff over.
Mark and David have settled in and are coping well with the challenges. We’re not certain how a number of issues will work, and this remains a concern to us all. As an example, the entire building footprint has been moved on the latest plan so it is now around 16m closer to the south eastern wall. None of us can work out why this was done but it doesn’t leave much room for access between the yards and the wall for the transport of kit from container pad to the compound. We can work around it but it would have been easier left as it was on the initial plan.
We’ve been well occupied here. The levelling is done, although doesn’t look to be that well compacted in places but we can deal with this once we start the foundations. We received pricing back for the initial concrete work and each contractor had submitted a schedule with hugely varied quantities making it tricky to work out true costs. As an example, one contractor had calculated 240m3 of concrete in the founds and another got up to 920m3. We’ve since given them all a schedule with quantities taken off by us and should get this back today so we can award tomorrow and start excavations either Sunday or Monday. One of the contractors, has now gone from being good to get pricing from but probably expensive to being highly shonky and not to be trusted according to the client. In fact they’ve become so bad in the last 4 weeks since I was here, that they are now allegedly on a government blacklist. No-one seems to have told them this though which is interesting....
We are all set for the first of our containers to arrive. We have a couple of cranes tentatively booked in, along with a 6.5T forklift. We found a 15t al terrain and the forklift yesterday in a yard on the road to the airport and managed to make a deal with the owner for 700,000fcfa per day all up plus diesel. This is half our previous price so a good result. We’ll probably use them on Monday with the first container and see how they go. We’ve also discussed with the client our craneage situation and he’s keen for us to look into buying one and shipping it over.
We also don’t yet have permission to open our containers on site though we’ve been assured this will be in place before Monday, and we’ll continue to chase. To have them unloaded elsewhere and then have to get a truck etc to bring the gear up tot site will be a major pain in the arse obviously so its imperative we sort this.
We’ve been asked to do a presentation to the ministry of urban on the plant, and been sent a PowerPoint presentation in English. This will be yet another last minute thing that distracts us from the tasks in hand, but is something we’re going to have .
We met with the contractor yesterday to discuss the various snags. The site bathrooms, especially the tiling, needs work as does the newly constructed guard house. I have noticed though that the tiling in our villa is probably as bad if not worse than that on site so it could be just that they don’t know how to do it any better. We’ll see what they come up with in terms of remedial work. He is keen to get us to sign off his final payment and keeps calling both me and the client, who tells him he won’t be paying anything unless I approve it which is good.
Most disappointing to me was the state of the container unload pad. I had specifically told them to ensure this was as good as it possibly could be as it would demonstrate to us their capabilities. It is not even close to being level and its very badly finished. After a long discussion yesterday, he admitted that yes, it wasn’t very good and that he was sorry that he’d let us down.
I explained that because of this, we wouldn’t be asking him to price any of the floors inside the new buildings.
I have some concerns over the local capabilities with concrete, and have had a chat with you guys on getting a couple of guys and some Kelly floats/bull floats etc into a container.
On the security front, we have 2 guards on site and one at the villa all the time. The army guards have not yet eventuated (in spite of being promised about 4 weeks ago) and we’ve asked the client to chase this with the government. Whilst there’s not much interest in the site at the moment, we do still get random people showing up and this will only increase once we have some gear and some work underway. We’ve been slowly training up our guards and will be implementing the pass system in the next couple of days.
The first time the client turned up to have look on site, they would not let him in which although a pain for Larabas, was a good thing from our point of view as they seem to now understand what we need them to do.
We also still have people resident in the small house in the compound on site. Given that the contents of our first container will be stored in the compound, we are pushing to clear them and their goats/cows/geese out of there as soon as possible. The client tells me they’ll be gone in a week as the government have now provided another house elsewhere but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Andrew from the security co turns up on Sunday, (after being unable to get the passport with his visa in in time to come down with me) to do their in country assessment for us. He’ll be staying with us in the villa so will have a good handle on our situation here by the time he leaves. We should have their reports with us before Christmas.
Anyway, it’s good to be back here. We’re now in the villa which is so much better than the hotel as we can do our own thing and have a bit of space around us rather than living in one room out of a suitcase. Some photos attached of the villa. The pool has been causing some issues but we finally managed to get all the pumps/filters etc fixed yesterday and should be able to have a dip when we get back from site today. We also now have our cook, Muhammad, who is pretty good. He also takes care of the shopping, sorting our menus and, most importantly, the washing up. The meals he does are a major step up from the Hotel, and Larabas has joined us every night for dinner. We also have a “house boy” who does the gardens, cleaning and other odd jobs and most importantly, the ironing.
We’ll be going to get some more house stuff tomorrow to make it a bit more comfortable.
We have our exercise gear here too which is good although I can’t see it lasting the full year as it is mainly cheap rubbish. David and I went for a run round the block yesterday and this morning. As you know, my fitness level is pretty low and my running experience minimal so given that David is an Olympic athlete from way back, you can guess how this went. It was good to be out of the villa and have a look around away from work for half an hour though.
That’s all for today,
Patrick
