6 Weeks?

Hard to believe 6 weeks have already gone by. We're all starting to get into the swing of things here. The boys have started home schooling, Jamie is supervising house renovations and Rusty is working on the preliminary steps for the hospital construction process.

The seeds for the project really started about a year ago. Franklin Graham was in Liberia for the festival put on by the Bill Graham Evangelistic Association. He took a tour of the ELWA hospital and saw the poor shape it was in and need for drastic improvements to the facility. In October of 2011 Samaritan's Purse committed to constructing a new hospital for ELWA. The advertisement went out for a Construction Manager to oversee the construction and Rusty applied...and here we are. That's the CliffsNotes version at least.

Rusty has been visiting with Liberian contractors who have submitted to be pre-qualified to bid on the project. Almost 50 contractors submitted their portfolios for consideration. That list has been whittled down to about 10 contractors that have constructed large enough projects to earn a site visit.

The contractor below is building a gymnasium at a local Catholic trade school. The next two pictures demonstrate just how much effort has to be put into construction here. They are mixing the concrete on the ground in a gas driven concrete mixer, hoisting it up about 3 stories, dumping it into a large cart, pushing it across the wooden bridge they've built, and finally dumping it onto the zinc roofing to slide down to the location of the pour for that day. In the US you'd just call the concrete pumping company and...well that would be it.





The first floor of the gym will be for classrooms and admin, but now it's home for a couple saints...

Blessing last week wanted to get out some lip gloss her aunt Jeanna sent with her. Next thing I knew she had covered her eyes in it. Pretty.

Last week a group came out from Auburn University. Here are the players and coach with some of the SP kids. Lots of fun.

The team from EMI came for two weeks to start the hospital design process. They've been gone for a couple weeks now but they left behind a bag full of toys that they didn't get a chance to take to any local kids. We went and visited one of our favorite orphanages last week and delivered the toys. The glasses were a big hit...

Although Blessing had a hard time understanding why she didn't get any toys :(
That's all for now