Powerful Neighbor

We're feeling a bit threatened this morning. Not with violence, but with the loss of elbow room.

Our agent with governmental stuff, Sylvestre, came by just now. He was at the urban planning department to inquire after our request for the strip of land next to our driveway where we have built the talibé shelter. We want this land to give ourselves a buffer from encroaching development. Our fear is neighbors who will object to noise from conferences or programs here. Or those who would disturb us with their activities. Neither a house nor a mosque would be a good idea in the space right next to our front gate. So we have been trying for several years to get a lease on this bit of land to our south.

Now today, Sylvestre brings news that the rich and powerful guy building the hotel between us and the ocean has plans for this same strip. He wants to build an access road to his place and he wants to put it behind our property, on the ravine side, along the back fence.

Is that good? Is that bad? We’re not sure. The land at our entrance would be very helpful to have and we wouldn’t want to lose that. Yet, if you have to have a neighbor in the city, a small hotel driveway is much better than other options! One complication would be that our sewage system drains gray water into the valley behind us. The road would likely cut that off and force us to implement a drainage field or some other system. Would that be expensive? And also, would our wall then need to be very high without the protection of the thorny valley wall we have now? A high wall would cut off our view and the ocean breeze a bit. Is that a big problem or just an inevitability of city life?

Change. And the possibility of an unscrupulous person taking advantage of our ignorance. These are on our minds this morning.

Please pray for wisdom and boldness and the right contacts.

Thanks.

Communication

We're moving into the modern era here at the Phare de l'Esperance. Through the generous help of a friend, we're having an internal phone system installed in our offices and a few other places around the conference center.

Herve's office will have the main controlling phone. We'll have regular phones on Rodney's desk and mine. The guard will also have one. Then we're running a line all the way down to the far corner to Herve and Patricia's apartment. On the way we'll put a phone in Apartment A, where we live now and where Aaron and Sarah Toombs will live when they come in a few months.

This will allow us to much more easily take incoming calls. It will also allow us to deal with people at the gate after-hours more easily. The guard will be able to just call Herve or us and ask, instead of having to leave the visitor waiting while he walks down and bangs on a door. For that matter, now Patricia can just call Herve up and say, "Hey! It's supper time. Where are you?" Or maybe that will be Jane calling me...

Solo, the brother in Christ who is installing the system, figured they could finish in two days. After day one, I just smiled. I'm so glad other people have the same problem I do in estimating too optimistically!

At the end of day two we do have the big switching box, the brains of the thing, hanging on the wall. And we have three functioning telephones. And wire all the way to the outside of our apartment. They are getting very close.

But these poor guys working on this job have discovered the French-built, poured concrete walls. Many drill bits have given their lives for this job. Many concrete nails are now bent. The team is weary, but they haven't given up yet!!

Meanwhile, Herve and I have had to abandon our offices for various amounts of time these last couple of days. Less for me than for him. Since Herve's office is the Reception desk for the Phare and the phone system is located there, he has basically had to find other things to do than use a computer and a telephone. His are surrounded by chaos!

Maybe tomorrow will see normality and good communication return.

The Wheaton football players got off to the airport just fine on Saturday. As always, it was great to have them. The place was full of energy all week and we saw lots of visible progress on various projects.

Half of the guys were with us here on Friday morning to work, though the afternoon and Saturday were spent at DA for a couple of events. On that last half day they were able to keep moving us forward, however.

The old closet and the wall between Apartment E (little Albert Quenum's bedroom) and the new apartment came down with a lot of sweat and concerns. We worried about beams and large chunks of concrete and steel falling on our heads. In the end, though, we had no real problems beyond the heat and a sledge hammer head that didn’t want to stay on its handle. What was left was as simple as we hoped, too. Structurally, all the crossbeams were up high with no posts left in inconvenient places! So on Saturday Jean's crew put up the new wall and put in the window frame looking out onto the courtyard. Today they are plastering the walls and resetting the door frame. Hopefully, Albert will be able to move back in tomorrow.

Jean’s guys are also starting on the kitchen of this studio apartment. Albert, the mason, was smashing the wall brick to lay the water lines when I went around taking photos today.

Meanwhile, Pierre Marie also has been working. He’s been doing doors for the new public restroom. We’ve had to take Jean away from that work site this week to get the studio apartment going. He’s got a bit more to do on the sink and plumbing. I confess that I’ve been feeling a bit discouraged that we haven’t yet completed what we started in January. Logically, the priority has to be on living space that we need for clients. But emotionally, I really wanted to have that second bathroom going. So it was a big encouragement to see doors on the stalls today.

It also is wonderful to see the gravel spread in front of the dorm. It feels so much more finished this way. And when the rain comes, this will solve major mud issues!

And the clothes lines are up and just waiting the next team to spread some gravel around them.

We’ve seen lots of progress in a very short time. Praise the Lord.

Multi-Tasking

We've had half of the Wheaton guys working with us here at the Phare each day. Half means 17 or 18 folks. That is a wonderful gift, of course. It is free, enthusiastic labor. And these folks are all strong, focused athletes, even the young women. But is is also a bit of a challenge. They tend to finish hard jobs so rapidly that my main fear is that I'll run out of stuff for them to do!

We are splitting into four work crews each day. One has been doing electrical work. Patrice knows enough at this point about wiring and surface conduit that I can entrust a crew to him. His English is weak but enough to allow him to explain things with a little help from me and some pointing and gesturing. They installed fans in the dormitory bathroom and cleaned up the wiring on the veranda of the villa.

Another team has been painting. They've attacked the drop ceiling in the dormitory hallway that Pierre Marie put in in the fall. As t dries, that group has started digging holes for our clothes lines. We want to move them over by Apartment A, instead of right by the back door of the conference room. We've got some holes, but the old posts need extensions to their old rusty legs.











Another work crew is cutting brush and cleaning up in various areas. They got out front around the new building foundation yesterday. On Monday they attacked the back fence. The pile of dead brush for a bonfire Friday is growing nicely!












The most important project for the week, of course, is our big renovation / transformation of the two dormitory rooms that we label D and D2. This was the old elementary dormitory of the orphanage. It was also at one point the UWM field office when Roxanne and Mack lived here. We're turning one large bedroom, one small bedroom, a shower room and a water closet into a one-bedroom efficiency apartment. With A/C.




The smashing and breaking continues! The tiles on the walls of the shower room and WC are tougher to get off than I ever imagined. But we'll have it done today. The big West African twist is that there is no cement available at the moment. All the big dealers are off for the pilgrimage to Touba, so the small guys are out of their stocks, it seems! So no masonry today. Bummer.









Being that this is the Wheaton guys, we had to have a spontaneous contest of strength develop. The posts from the old back gate that have been waiting for a solution caught the eye of the guys. They have taken sledges and chisels and are slowly turning one of these into a pile of rubble. Yeah!

Wheaton Football Ministry Project

This will have to be a quick post. The Wheaton football players are here. 35 folks came in Saturday night. 27 players are in the dormitory. 2 female trainers, the coach’s daughter and an alumni couple are in Apartment B. The coach (Jeff Peltz this year), a manager from Wheaton

food services and a professor/pastor are in Apartment C.

We did orientation on Sunday after church. That included some time together in the conference room helping them “frame” the week by talking about expectations and goals. We also gave them the short version of cross-cultural preparation. Then we split into smaller groups to learn some greetings and to hear about the various ministries they’ll be helping out this week. Jane talked about DA. Donnie C explained his ministry with the Southern Baptists here in the city. José gave them an explanation of MIS. Rodney covered UWM as a whole. I watched the clock! We also introduced them to attaya, the strong Arabic tea that we drink here.

Afterwards, guys from DA and folks from Eglise Evangélique came to play volleyball.

Now we’re full bore into work. Yesterday was filled with smashing and bashing and chopping and cutting and pushing and lugging heavy items! Well, some of the guys also painted and wired and measured carefully.

As always, this is a lot of fun for all of us here and we’re getting lots done. The D/D2 site is mostly cleared. The drop ceiling is gone. The doors and windows are out. The dividing walls are gone. We’ll smash a bit more today and tomorrow start a bit of wall building with them. It’s a great start.