Today was another Parade day

Today was another Parade day. We don't know what it was for other than the participants were all School children. Lots of small parades all over the city.

 Fortunately they don't shut down traffic for the parade, you just kind of drive around it.

This was contract signing day for our largest project so far. It is a $96,000 project to bring water and sanitation into 12 Villages for about 8,000 people. Our contract is with an organization that will do all this for us. All we have to do is pay them the money and monitor it.

The person signing the contract is Paul Who is the CEO. Unfortunately his eyesight is failing. We had not seen him for a few months and we could tell that he was seeing less. I don't know what his ailment is but I wonder if it's something that would be treatable in a more advanced country.

This is the official contract signing picture. We sure have learned a lot about African culture during the contract process. Time is way different than it is in America. Everything is really slow and inefficient and everybody just accepts it.  Even with our church professional staff we have in Accra Ghana that does all the contracts and the financing there is still no sense of urgency or efficiency.  The interesting thing is that I was the only one who was stressed that everything was going so slow. I am learning.

In a couple of weeks we will be going to Accra, Ghana to escort some members of the church through the temple. Because the flight is so early it makes sense to stay in a hotel by the airport. There is a very nice airport hotel but it cost about $300 a night. Just by the airport is the structure pictured above that we knew was built as a hotel but we never saw anybody in it nor any signs of activity. We asked around at the church branch that we attend and they said it was in business and open. So we drove in and sure enough it is a quality nice hotel. Except there were no customers there. I can't understand it. There were only a couple of cars in the parking lot.

Here is a picture of the room we might stay in. It is wonderful. The bathroom is very, very nice. They have a great restaurant there and a pool. It will cost $150 a night.  It's so nice to occasionally find businesses and accommodations that have the comforts of home.

Today at church there was no water for the bathrooms. The reason is was that someone stole the pump. The pump fit on the end of this pipe and had that concrete block box over it. There was also a lot of theft as this new church building was being built. 

Generally, there's a lot of theft in the country. It's baked into the culture. The government officials are corrupt and they steal from the people and the people are hungry so they rationalize stealing from people who they think can afford it.  Everywhere there are lots of full-time security guards, including many of our church buildings. Maybe this church building will get added to the security guard list.