an eye opening experience…

This post was to be called finishing touches but for certain reasons that I’ll explain in due course I had to postpone that task to tomorrow.

I will focus instead on the meeting I had at QEII hospital concerning the new playground. I was surprised both at the amount of people, hierarchies and burocrassy involved in the construction of such a small play area.

But before I go onto that I’d like to say that today I met another quite interesting character, I met an English architect, Peter Hancock, which has been here for around 40 years I would say. So when I have time I will go and meet him in his office, and see if he can shine some light on those years, see if he can help me understand when it was that, for example, the block and tin roof became the main habitat of the Basotho.

Two weeks ago Paola, the Clinton Foundation and I managed to get the Dr. Mosotho, the Hospital Superintendent, to agree on letting us build it. At the time I had thought that in a matter of weeks I would come around with a few people to help and with bang it up in place and then move on.

That’s where I got it wrong… It will go through a much more complex process of approvals and fundraising, consultation with another architect that had been invited to do it before us. Then in almost a month time we’ll meet again and decide on a date to build it… This building task will not be also as simple as imagined. Children and adults are to be involved and what was to be a swift job has now transformed itself into a mega-operation.

I don’t believe its anybodies fault, just mine probably for being naïve and expecting things to be done in a quick and simple way. I guess that like this it does bring some advantages, it will get the publicity that it needs and once it has been set up more people will be able to call it theirs, therefore enhancing both the sense of community and ownership.

The only thing I just can’t quite understand (me not being a very religious person) is why we ended this meeting with a prayer… All 8 of us (yes 8 people were needed for this particular task, next meetings we’ll be 9 because one person had wrongly not been invited) rose, closed the eyes and thanked God for the opportunity to do this and asked him for help in completing it. My mind at the time must have been elsewhere because I didn’t understand what was happening, luckily I was the only one so I managed to get away with it.