Construction Begins....

Its been far too long since I've written on here Jo's been doing a great job of keeping you all up to date with what we've been up to but I thought it's time I fill everyone in on how I've been getting on at work. I don't think I've written anything since July so I owe everyone an apology. As most of you know I'm working at Green Pastures hospital, most of my work involves looking after a project which includes the construction of a new out patient department building. We're builidng the new building because the old one is not very wheelchair friendly which for a hospital that provides rehabilitation services for spinal injury patients is a bit silly. I've spent the last few months working with local Nepali civil/structural engineers and architects to nail down the finer points of the buildings design. Last month we were finally ready to tender for the construction of the building. This turned out to be an interesting process. INF has quite a detailed procedure  for how to go about tendering for large purchases of equipment and services, after completing this tender I could see why. Started off by advertising in the newspaper for interested parties to come to the office and collect all the appropriate documents to compile and submit their tender. As is usually the case in the west the companies had to submit their tenders to us by a certain date. That day finally rolled around without much interest, three companies had collected the documents to submit the tender, the day before the tender was to close about twenty companies came in and collected the forms. The day the tenders were due to be submitted a gang turned up at the hospital to stop anyone from submitting their tenders. Fortunately there was no violence and the police came and sent them on their merry way. Only three companies actually ended up submitting a tender one of which was chosen to do the job. A little different from home, I never did find out which construction company had sent their gang in, it may even be the one we chose. Fortunately so far they seem to be a pretty reasonable bunch of people who have done work for us in the past.

A week after the company was given the job construction started, they are now well on their way to digging the foundations, all by hand of course. I'll do my best to put photos on here regularly so you can see the progress.

Site of the new OPD building