Alès, Frankreich; Barcelona; Und noch mehr?

Dear all,

everything is still going very well here. We are back in Kigali and are happy to get back to our normal live here. The time in Gahunduguru was very interesting and we made great experiences, but still we had to cut alot of our needs and especially privacy so here we feel like in a little paradise, including shower and sometimes even electricity.
On Monday morning we woke up by a thunder like sound and our building vibrating. Suprised and still confused from our dreams, wondering weather a truck had hit our house, we experienced our first earthquake, even though it was very weak and passed as fast as it came.

The last week at the bridge site passed as follows…

Monday:

On the weekend of 14^th and 15^th of may, I have been in Kigali to buy materials and pick up the welding equipment and the technician. We arrived at 15 o´clock at the bridge. Very excited we tried the first welding. The technician welded for about half an hour under the eyes of a couple hundred interested people from the village. Then finally he said: Doesn´t work, welding rots too large or generator too weak.

That was really annoying, since we had tried out the generator a couple of times in Kigali and apparently everything was: NO PROBLEM. But since everything is NO PROBLEM here and at the end it is a problem, we should have been prepared. Anyway, the generator got too hot very fast and shut down. So, once more, we had to find a African solution: Somebody knew somebody, who knew somebody, who was somewhere with his motorbike. This somebody was send to drive for one hour somewhere, where he could buy smaller welding rots. Then this somebody drove back to somewhere in order to continue driving to Gahunduguru. All that was not possible without a flat tire and other small problems. But in the end, we got our welding rots the same night at 0:00.

After we had organised that, we just had to wait at the bridge for the “GUNMAN” (security person) to arrive who had to look after our generator and the welding equipment. Luckily he left Gahunduguru at 15:00, so he should arrive at the bridge at 16:00. Strangely, when we called at 17:00 to ask where he was, he told us that he had just left Gahunduguru. So one more hour. At 18:00 we left the bridge and told the chief of the “village” (more two or three farms) next to the bridge to wait at the site for the GUNMAN to arrive. When he finally arrived it was 20:00 and we were already up in Gahunduguru and ready to go to bed.

Tuesday:

In the morning, we had to pay the Mototaxidriver, which had brought the welding rots during the night. Excited we were waiting for the test welding, which at the end worked out very good. Only the welder started to wonder, whether there are enough welding rots, which got me pretty mad, since maybe he could have thought about it, before we send the mototaxi to drive through the whole country. But finally, he said: Ntakybaso (NO PROBLEM).

So we told Alfred, one of our students to assist the welder while our employees from the village finished the drainage, by cutting a tree in the right length, that we had cut the day before. Nobody uses saws or anything similar. All works are done with the machetes and we were really impressed by the power, the people here have. They work for hours, always happy and chatting under the hot sun.

During the day, we found some of our best planks, which had been burned in a nice little fire by the GUNMAN the night before. At noon, the local authorities came to visit us on site and we explained them our work. We agreed to buy the most needed planks for a price of 1500 rwf per piece. During the afternoon a old man came, telling us, that the authorities had told him to sell us the planks. He told us his super-special-white-mans-offer of 1700 rwf per piece and one week delivery, without any chance to get it earlier. After a little discussion we agreed not to take the super-white-mans-offer but to pay him 1500 rwf for the planks with a delivery for the same day.

The welder worked during the whole day very efficient and well, until he decided to throw his welding mask in the river. Luckily, as always and I still did not yet understand why, there were many people working somewhere in the bushes doing I don´t know what. So one of them jumped into the river and saved the floating mask and gave it back to the welder. Therefore all needed reinforcements were welded on the bridge this day and we decided to weld some supplementary reinforcements the next day. After having discussed this with the welder and asked him, weather he could cut some steel profiles with the flex, he went home to relax and take a shower. The end of the day passed without any problems, only Donata coloured herself badly with anti rust paint.

Wednesday:

When we arrived on site, the welder was surprised when we asked him to cut the profiles. This, he said, is not possible and by the way, all the problems with the welding is definitely the mistake of the white people. Since we really needed the profiles to be cut, he started to cut them with his welding machine, which in the end didn´t work. So I told him, to cut it with the flex, which he denied, since there definitely is no chance to cut it. After we discussed, we said he would try and 30 seconds later, the first of the two profiles was cut. Before he started to cut the second one, he agreed that: yes, it is possible, but, since he was employed to weld, we would definitely need more money, since now he had to cut. And then, this was enough. I started to get so mad like I have seldom been and shouted at him, that I am paying him 15000 rwf and if I want him to dance on the bridge the whole day for that money, he has to do that. And if he doesn´t start cutting right away, I will find so many possibilities to weld on this stupid bridge, that he will weld the whole night through. 20 min later everything was cut and weld.

During this time, Donata and me where trying to nail the planks to the bridge and embarrassed ourself badly. With a great smile, the welder came over and hammered the nails into the planks like if they were butter. So he was happy to embarrass us and afterwards we talked again and everything was fine…

Thursday:

On Thursday, we had to finish our work. So we had to make the drainage, nail the planks, where we failed the day before and do the stress test. Since we had told the local workers the day before to bring hammers, we had two very creative, self-made hammers on the site. Everything went like planned and, even-though the people did not understand why they had to carry heavy sacks on the bridge, we could finish the whole work at 2 o´clock. Since we were too lazy to carry the sacks off the bridge again, we told the people, they can have them, if they empty them in the water before. We were surprised of how much value the sacks were for them, because only minutes later, there were more than 20 people standing on the bridge opening the sacks with nails, teeth and other tools. Therefore only 10 minutes later, everything was gone and the bridge clean and ready for the presentation the next day.

Friday:

On Friday morning we had a real breakfast, with bread and tee. This was great, after two weeks of mashed bananas etc. So we were starting the day in a great mood. At 10 we were at the site for the presentation to the local authorities and the people of the village. Our students held a very nice speech in Kinyarwanda and the people were very happy and interested. In the afternoon, we met all the people we got to know during our stay and celebrated with a beer in the only bar of the village. Happy and excited to get back in civilisation the next day we went to bed.

Saturday

While we were waiting for the car that would bring us back to Kigali to arrive we were walking around and playing. When it finally came, the teacher who accommodated us came with a very old camera and we took a nice last picture. Then we drove back on the bumpy and muddy (it had rained the night before) road and arrived at 2 o´clock in Kigali.

From then on, we were just enjoying all the thinks we had missed during our stay in Gahunduguru: Shower, beer, privacy, balcony, civilisation, electricity etc. In the evening we went eating out in a Musungu-Restaurant and had a great pizza.

The experiences we made during our construction are great and, even sometimes difficult, we will remember this stay as a great time.

Hope you are all doing fine

Mathis

This entry was posted on Donnerstag, Mai 26th, 2011 at 12:27 and is filed under Allgemein. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.