27 Months of La Pura Vida

During the past week since the last update, there has been some enough progress with the project in the medical clinic to warrant another entry.   However, seeing as it has only been a week, there is very little to update outside of the medical clinic so this should be a short enough update but as you can infer from the title, I have been all over the place this past week, up and down on the roller coaster ride that is Peace Corps and project management in Costa Rica.

To start, the original price for materials (the one I used to write the grant), increased over $300 since we first had it done in the construction supply store so I was stuck scrambling to see how we were either going to cover the costs or what materials we could take off in order to get the costs down to where we needed them.  Luckily, Edgar, the high school teacher, still has a contact at the store we used for the basketball court and he was able to get the costs back around within $50 of the original costs which was covered by the committee and we got the materials purchased, had them all delivered within 3 days of purchase (incredible considering where we are located) and got to work that following Sunday.  Naturally, once we started working, we began to realize that we were missing quite a few other materials and had to get a little creative and figure out how to get the missing materials.  Once we started working, it was slow going but little by little we got the trenches/foundation set, began setting the blocks and each day managed to get 2-3 rows of block laid.  However, I began to notice a fairly big issue; each day we had a different contractor to help out because there was no money to pay for a fixed individual person.  Each contractor would arrive and immediately begin to say "oh it would have been better to do it this way" or "the other guy forgot about (x) thing...we need to fix that first."  And, because there was no fixed person, each contractor we were able to get for free was really just a guy from the community that claimed to know how to lay block (I now have my doubts about some of them).  One guy failed to measure the width of the metal door before deciding on the width of the door frame for the storage closet so now after laying 12 layers of block, we are now just realizing we are going to have a 30cm gap between the wall and the door (not the safest storage closet) and in order to fix this, it is going to require a lot more physical labor mixing cement and a lot of cement bags which we don't have to spare.  One wall is also 1cm off level at the top which isn't a big deal but something that likely wouldn't happen if we had a fixed, experienced contractor.   Currently, the storage closet is just about done (except for the fricking door...) and we are starting on the bathroom tomorrow.  Meanwhile, the fencing, with a fixed, experienced contractor, is almost all up and we are just waiting for a few more materials in order to finish it off potentially this coming week.

Coming Up

As I said above, construction will continue this week, weather permitting, and we could potentially see the storage closet with a roof on it, some decent progress on the bathroom and the majority of the fencing installed by the end of this week.  On Friday, I head to San Jose for a dentist appointment and then on Saturday, meet up with a buddy from the Southwest part of the country that is doing a Courts for Kids project (the same basketball court project I completed last May).  His team arrives Saturday and on Sunday we all head down to the Osa Penisula and get started working Monday and continue to work until the following Saturday.  This means 2 weekends out of site, away from the construction here but no vacation from manual labor.  But what concerns me is that if we do not make decent progress this week on the bathroom, what will happen during the 10 days I am away from the construction?