Monday's Report from Sikuwa
Updated: 2 days ago
We spent today organising our next project at Sikuwa in Warazas.
This will actually run over 4.1km and will supply nearly 1200 people with water. The guys from the water office had organised a list of all the hardware needed so have already purchased that from the local hardware shop. Inflation is huge at the moment and everything has gone up since June although our dollar is buying more. The cost for the labour was higher than I expected so Yalew and I had a quiet chat to Tekele from the water office and he believes it to be a fair price. He reported that Mokie wanted to get some work and dropped the price on the bigger projects for us so that we could get to know each other. Tekele believes he really would not have made a profit at all on some of the work. Having gone back in to Qanqo (that took us two days to get around even when aided by motorbikes) I’m not sure how he did manage to do those projects for the price he charged. It really is so remote. This idea is unusual in our culture but with my experience, I have no reason to see this as anything other than a cultural difference.
We don’t have quite enough in the bank to cover all the labour so I organised two contracts with Mokie to split it in half. The first contract we can afford now of course and the second one is about AUD 8,700 so when the money turns up we can give the go ahead.
Having said that, we then went to the bank and found that there is about AUD 5,000 in our joint bank account so we’re about $3,000 down.
Our work here is done for the time being so tomorrow we will drive back to Addis (8 hours). Birhun will go to his home in Addis and Yalew will fly back to Debark. We’re all a bit pooped - especially because the kitchen in the hotel caught fire at 3am and we hung around outside for an hour while they put it out. And none of us got back to sleep. The general manager of the hotel just tracked me down to apologise for the inconvenience and for disturbing our sleep - that wouldn’t happen in Australia!
Catherine
