SFC construction begins

Hazel Dell's group left on Friday, and Saturday brought a small but mighty group of five men group from Sherwood Oaks for a week to help kick start the work on the SFC (our clever acronym for the Second Floor of the Clinic)

We have gone over this before, but there are several good reasons to start tackling this project now, not even cooling our heels from working on the TSP...which is in the home stretch but does have some smaller details yet to finish, and with still no inaugaration date selected and the paperwork not done, we are not pressured to finish that quite yet, but probably could do everything that remains in a week if we really needed to do so.


So, why the second floor? 

1.  Need more space for the general medicine work effort.

2.  Want to expand general medicine into X-ray and ultrasound (as a first step...could surgery be in the works in three years?  Possibly with Darwin graduating and moving to specialization)
3.  Need more room for the sewing ministry
4.  Need a souvenir space for groups
5.  Need a place to sell snacks/food to groups and clinic patients
6.  Need to seriously cool down the first floor, which several months out of the year can reach over 90 degrees
7.    Proper storage for Hill Climber coffee

So, the goal with the group is to weld all the pieces of this big jigsaw puzzle together, get them up, and get the big covering started of roofing and exterior pieces. 

We are not swimming in the moolah to make this happen, kind of tapping into some reserve funds to make this happen now while we have the help.  Finding pipes and other supplies on sale and scrounging for deals helps...but we will be also dependent on the kindness of strangers, but mostly friends, to keep the effort going.  (notice the not-so-subtle plug there and most blatant donate button located here...I am loathe to do it, but we can not pinch pennies without those pennies being so generously provided!) 

Through Tuesday the group has successfully welded the back wall, and the roof supports for four additional columns.  We need to get one more column put together to finish everything the building will need!  We won't be finishing all that this week however, as today got the back wall vertical, with the following days focusing on putting up some of those other four already made columns and getting them structurally sound, and perhaps the roofing begun before they have to depart back to the US and we will then have to figure out how to proceed from there.