No one is ever alone or lonely here

 There is always a lot of people outside here. It may be because there's not much to do inside and it's usually uncomfortably hot inside. Most people live without utilities. That means no TV 's, computers or air conditioning in their houses. Not many people are lonely here. Most people are always with somebody else. When you travel you either walk with a group or you are on a motorcycle where there can be a couple more passengers or you are in a taxi where there could be six other people crammed next to you.  

This is one of the major tire repair shops in town. I went there yesterday because our rear tire had a leak. They had to put a plug in it. Whenever they have to take a tire off of a rim they use a sludge hammer and a wedge to break the seal and to eventually get the tire off. I haven't seen an automated tire changing machine yet.

We had 50 desks delivered to the Wein town school this week. The principle was really anxious because a lot of the students have to stand up for the entire day. Each of these desks will set three or four students. The seats have no backs.

There is a lot of old building shells here. A lot of them date back to the civil war in 2000. A lot of buildings just don't get finished either. This building is slowly reverting back to nature.  This building is next door to our church building in Dolos town.

We visited another decrepit hospital this week. This is the Redemption hospital that is a major government institution. This is their autoclave that doesn't work. The major need here is reliable electrical power. There was no electricity in the hospital when we were there. Because this is the dry season the reservoir they use to generate electric power is running low so the government only generates power for part of the day.  Everything just mostly stops when the power goes out and the patients just wait. They see about 300 patients a day.

Of course they have problems with serious roof leaks.  This Probably will be the last major project of our mission. We cannot start anything within the last three months. They want us to have everything finished by the time we leave.

It's been a rough week dealing with my African supervisors in a Accra, Ghana. The African business culture is just so different. There is not much communication. They changed the terms of our contracts without telling us until it was a major inconvenience. They decided to revise the system where they transfer money to our contractors without telling us until the last minute. It was a major production to resubmit financial information for all of our contractors when all they needed was just one additional piece of information.

Having to report and work with the African management and financial system has by far been the most frustrating part of our mission. Everything is significantly harder than it needs to be. It got so tough that one of our fellow humanitarian missionaries in another country wrote to the area president to complain. I have become a lot better at being patient.

Other than the financial and reporting problems the mission is great. The amount of good we have been able to do with the projects that we have got implemented has really been satisfying.  The hand of the Lord has been with us to help us weather the difficult times and to guide us to find good projects.