About Time

So, six weeks plus. No excuses. Except massive virus attacks that required formatting four computers twice each, and mine three times; mobilization of our project, initiation of a brick making project, loss of two staff, hiring of new ones, and a bunch of things I don't want to talk about.

The status is this: alive, mostly healthy, coping with my project.

The project stats are this:

Months in progress: 6
Houses built: 3
Houses in progress this month: 40
Staff:182
Concrete blocks made each day: 1200
Cubic metres of timber in my warehouse: +/- 300
Tonnes of materials moved daily: 30 to 50
Number of km. on my motorcycle in 6 months: 6000
Km. on truck: 30,000
Time it takes to get to projet site: 1hr. 12 minutes
Distance to project site: 27 km.

The at home stats are this:
No. of bars of mobile signal at my house: 0
No. of channels of TV: 0
No. of meals involving seafood each day: 2
No. of meals I eat each day: 2
Kg. of coffee consumed per week in our office: 2
Kg. of sugar consumed per week in our office: 5
No of DVDs watched more than 4 times this year: 5
No. of games of chess played: 100
No. of games i've won: 2
No. of shoes destroyed by our puppy, Bobo: 10

So, in summary, I had a new manager come to help me run the base, and let me focus on start brick production. After one month he was reassigned to cover a shortage when family pulled another manager home, returning my staff to my totalitarian reign.

However, that month was enough to lift my head above the water, and see a raft. This month has been about learning to row, as I empower my staff to make decisions, and spend more time focused on individual weaknesses. We have restructured our logistics, to get a more smooth system, hired more field staff to expand our supervisory role, and built up our brick supply.

This month is the visits month, as our regional director visited at the start, and last week HR Manager. This week, my replacements, Paul and Periskila (like Priscilla) Brinks visit, as well as our Livelihood and microfinance manager Jenny, who will look at possibilities for supporting business initatives, and helping people support themselves financially. Finally, after a staff retreat next weekend, we will have a visit from the country director and new assistant country director, who was country director of Vietnam while I was there. It will be good to see David Chang and his wife Adele and their lovely kids again.

Now that things are settling, I will have less excuses, and work on more regular postings. I still expect to be in Canada by July 6.