Up! Up! And away…

March 9th at 9pm I will fly out and the mission will begin. As a case study for finishing my diploma at FAUP (Porto Architectural School), I've decided to volunteer and join A4A (Architects for Aid) in one of their humanitarian architecture projects. The projected on which I've been assigned is the construction of the LCCU (Lesotho Children Counseling Unit) centre in Lesotho. The building has been halted and an assessment, survey and new proposal and program will be drawn up in order that the building might finish to be built. Once this is completed a second trip will be organized and I'll be overseeing the building on site. The objective of this blog is to keep record of the work that is being done, both for the benefit of the members of A4A in London, FAUP to whom I'll also be reporting, my own record as well as friends and family that might want to know what I'm up to. Please comment on any post that you have an opinion, as this will undoubtedly help me in the completion of my thesis. Disclaimer: The information displayed on this site has not been previously edited or checked by any A4A staff and I'm the sole responsible for it's contents. A4A or any of the other involved organizations are not to be hold responsible on any account for what is published on this blog.

Saturday, 17 March 2007

Report 5




This report will be published at the same time as the nr 4. Sorry I didn’t have time to publish them separately.

Today was a busy day, and in the end quite fruitful! We started off by trying to visit some people in the Ministries and from the engeneering department but we weren’t able to do it. So we went down to the local builders merchant to see the prices.

You can’t imagine our surprise to discover that apart from one or two things they have about as much building materials as we do in Europe and for a 10th of the price! (I might be exaggerating but it’s really cheap! Trust me!

With this we thought that with the right builder there should be no reason not to achieve a pretty decent building. The only Item that we needed is the interlocking system, for the retaining wall but we were told that it cold be brought over from South Africa… so no real problem there either!

We also went to the LEC (Lesotho electricity company) and as in the rest of the world burocracy rules and you can’t get a quotation for how much something will cost until you fill in a form, but you can’t fill in a form until you’ve wired the building, so in the end it means that you can’t know how much it will cost you until it’s too late! Not that we’d ever consider not doing it but…

In the afternoon we showed one of the builders, that was chosen to give us a quote, around the site pointing out to him what we were thinking needed to be done… They were a team of an older more experienced builder and a young QS. They feel that the budget might be running a little short but that they’d come back to us.

We were not at all surprised by this especially when you consider that the total size of the building has risen 40% and is now about 400m2!

Tomorrow we’ll try and meet with another builder so as to get another quote, we will then be in a position to negotiate with the bank.

The rest of our time was spent climbing up the tunnel… Last report I said that we could see light at the end of the tunnel, we are now almost sure that we are in the right tunnel!
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