Missive from parts of Africa

A light hearted and sometimes serious look at moving 6000km into a place in Africa: April 2007. Promoted back to South Africa, the missive will continue to track my foray's into deepest Africa as and when I get there.

Name:
Location: Joburg, Africa, South Africa

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Finally I get nookie in Ghana

enough said.....*wicked chuckle*

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Political Missive

Lizette Rabe on News24 wrote a great column on how freedom of expressions is slowly but surely been done away with in South Africa.

She writes of two instances: One where our erstwhile Minister of Safety and Security spewed forth from his foul mouth that those of us complaining about the high crime in SA should shut up or move out of the country. The other was the cancellation by the SABC, of a program on our fun President Thabo. “Legal Issues” was cited as cause for cancellation.

This is not the first time this item has reared its ugly head.

The deliberate suppression of crime statistics comes to mind. The Stats SA debacle when they screwed up the inflation figures and happily blamed “the previous regime”. Oilgate, which has died an (un)natural death. The list goes on.

Do we have a free press in SA? Well they try. But ultimately the press knows one thing. South Africa is effectively a one party state. Therefore there will be no change in Government in the near – or not so near future. Ergo, they cannot afford to piss off the powers that be.

We have a wonderful constitution. This wonderful constitution is negated by rather scared individuals in government where the last thing they want is free speech.

But hey. We voted for them. So what the hell. It is our fault. One day the uneducated masses will realise this. I am, however, not holding my breath.

And therein rests my political post for the month.

Friday, June 16, 2006

Another week rushes to a close

Friday has once again rushed up on me.

I kid you not when I say I am losing days at a rapid rate of knots. Certain things were meant to be done by Wednesday. I only realised that Wednesday had passed me by on Thursday. There is something to be said about a whole lot of activity.

That said, I am been pushed from Tarkwa as there are a few things that my happy replacement is not up to speed on, and it is more expedient for me to do. Therefore, yours truly is off to Obuasi tomorrow for a client meeting and has a further client meeting on a nice large project on Monday.

However! The site is not working on Sunday. I am actually looking forward to a day off. *g*
I may even play golf on the golf course that stares at me as I stand OUTSIDE every morning having my lung kick start.

One thing about been on site and living on the mine is I never get to drive through town anymore. I also do not get the newspaper on a daily basis. It was noted as been an issue yesterday when I had cause to go to Bogoso Town and after a week driving 2km to and from work, suddenly once again had to grapple with Ghana drivers.

I battled for the first few minutes and swore a lot. Eventually the bad driving style so necessary for driving in Ghana came back to me.

Our Communications are now up and running after a bad start on Monday when it did not work at all for most of the day. I laughed when I heard the reason.

When they were here on Sunday the changed some routing tables to get my system to work. Evidently the correct procedures were not followed or something, but come Monday morning “someone” changed the routing tables back. And poof. I was off line until they realized that what they had done on Sunday was gone.

I await the other person changing the tables back.

Other than that:

Not much to report: Work, home, sleep, work

We have a delegation arriving next week with my Boss, Quality Control and Project Lifecycle people as well as my Cad Lad for Tarkwa workshop.

Not 100% sure where I am going to put them. I am assuming people will be making the trip between Tarkwa and Bogoso – along the road of death – daily.
Not a good thing to have. Or do.

Allow me to work some more!

Have a great long weekend people. (except for Esther who travels to Kuwait and misses out on the long weekend *chuckle*)

Sunday, June 11, 2006

FINALLY!!! We have communications on Site

Tis more than a week since I have updated my blog which will tell you that I have not had internet access for that period of time. I am currently doing all my email offline, sending my laptop to Tarkwa with a driver, he waits while my mail is sent and brings back all the new mail for me to action and respond.

Net effect – my response time on emails is two – three days.

HOWEVER!

The guys from Africa on line have been here for the last two days puttering around trying to get the sat system on site up and running. Loads of phone calls to some funny American lady, wires been pulled through the office and promises, promises, promises.

I am not holding my breath at all


What has happened over the last week?

Well besides knocking up 15 hour days we managed to meet our first small milestone – albeit a day late – and I lost my temper on site only once. Not bad considering.

Carl and Jeri toddled off to the beach for a few days in leau of R&R and yours truly was left alone to sink or swim. I do believe I have managed to keep my head above water and even managed to generate paperwork all by myself – that made sense to the lad who was reading it.

I managed to score some meat from Accra so on Thursday night happily instructed Nicolas – the chef/house boy to take out some fillet and marinade it in olive oil, garlic, black pepper and Nandos Extra Hot. He did it to a tee and I had a happy smile on my face as I tucked into meat that did not taste like cardboard.

I have a nice leg of lamb which is going to make a wonderful Slovakia tonight. Hehehe.

Neville came from down south – he is our QS – and he is sharing the house for a week.

It is world cup time. We miss most of the games courtesy of the hours we work, but are happy to watch the odd game here and there. The guys from Minproc have come up with a wonderful pool for the event which works as follows.

There are 64 matches. Each match you put down a winner and the goal difference (or a draw as the case may be). If you get the winner right, you get one point. Get the goal difference right, you get three points in total. Each match costs you GHC5.000. The person at the end of the cup who has the most cumulative points does a winner take all.

I have the sum total of 5 points after 5 games. I mean who would have thought Sweden would be held to a draw demmet. I did get the England score right as I was confident they would win and know they only have the capacity to score one goal. *chuckle*

Phones have been sporadic over the last week - what else is new – and the GPRS system seems to have thrown its toys out the cot and left Ghana. Considering that Areeba is now owned by MTN, courtesy of their take over of the Lebanese company, I can now start directing my snotty emails to MTN. I will not get a response of course - but hey – at least I will feel better.

My large cup has made the 36km journey to site and I do think the lady who makes the tea is a lot more comfortable that she only has to make 3 cups a day instead of the 3 cups an hour.

In two odd weeks, I will happily be able to say I finally have had sex in Ghana! (well with another person). Nessers will be winging her way up here and well…… You know the rest.

What else…..

I have not been able to access any news and only picked up yesterday that interest rates went up in SA by 0.5%. I laugh at the change of tack by the reserve bank where it now becomes obvious that they wish to protect the rand and current account and have decided that inflation targeting is not their only worry.

The weakening of the rand benefits us here as we get more bang for our USD. Gold price remains above $600/oz so the mines are still willing to spend. We have a nice full order book for the next three months and can afford to pick and choose a bit.

A lot of large company’s – mine included – subscribe to ISO 9000 et al. The job we are doing is required to conform to ISO 9001. I have never been a fan of formal quality control systems, but do recognize their worth.

What I do not recognize or agree with is how they hold up a job. Take a conveyor. Lots of lil chunks of steel you bolt up like a meccano set and eventually add a belt to take stone from one end of the plant to the other end.

One piece of steel is missing a hole for a bolt. Scratch head and ask site engineer to write a TQN (Technical Query note) which will say “Bolt hole on member 20149 missing”. One would also recommend “Drill bolt hole”. Said TQN goes to consultants, who sit on it for 3 days and send it on to fabricator. He then sits on it for a further 3 days and eventually confirms that “A Bolt Hole needs to be drilled”. He sends it back to consultant, further 3 days delay and eventually you get the piece of paper back that confirms you can drill a hole.

If the lad doing the structure had any sense, he would have drilled the hole. BUT no. He would have been fired as he is not qualified to make the decision if a hole should be drilled there or not. And so it goes on.

I am thus amazed that anything gets done at all. But construction people are a resourceful lot and they manage despite some ponytail thinking up new ways to delay doing things.

At small works we were spoilt. We said we would put up a structure and we put it up. Finish, Klaar. No TQN’s no waiting – just doing. That’s maybe why our clients like us so much.

So – quality has its place. Paperwork does not. Unless it affects the structural integrity of the bloody thing. But then again – it is assumed – correctly – that we are not structural engineers so we do not know what makes a difference.

Cover your ass syndrome if you ask me.

And that dear reader is my gripe for the week.

Well besides internet, phones, non smoking house etc etc.

It is Sunday

No-one else is working besides yours truly and the Sat people

I am off to play golf and hopefully after 9 holes the ether will be accepting my signal to the outside world.

Have fun all!!

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Another week bites the dust!

It is once again a Saturday and I realize a further week has passed without the time, effort or communications to update my blog. (Bogoso Sat Dish was delivered on friday so there is progress)

Having two jobs is a rather interesting affair, and I am spending my time on the Bogoso Road between the workshop and Site doing a lot of thinking while dodging people, goats and the plethora of trucks that choose that road as their final resting place.

I kid you not when I say EVERY DAY there is a new truck lying on it’s side or taken part in ploughing a new road into the jungle.

The trucks that break down choose a blind rise or bend in the road to shuffle their mortal coil, which then contributes to the head on collision that invariably transpires as our local populace omit to make sure the road is clear before moving onto the wrong side of the road.

And that is what transpired with another one of our LDV’s this week when said LDV made unexpected contact with a truck heading in the opposite direction. The explanation behind how the accident happened was so laughable it had to be true. The fact that we have had two head on collisions in the last two months and both our lads walked away with bumps and cuts means our Guardian Angel is having to work overtime to maintain my DI at acceptable levels.

One of the better ones this week as my mind wandered on the trip to Bogoso was a truck who was so overloaded that the trailer literally broke in half. This was after a particularly bad section of road – i.e. potholes which made the road non existent – that you could see the lad hitting a large hole and the trailer throwing its hands up in disgust and failing miserably to stay in one piece.

The road was blocked on Friday afternoon by a truck going up the hill – overloaded again – and missing a gear. This caused the truck to roll back and jack knife across the road. Judicious use of 4x4 low range allowed me to go off road into the jungle and pass the blockage.

My replacement – François – arrived on Thursday afternoon and he is busy getting his feet wet. The lads took him to the pub on Thursday night as an Akwaaba. He is still alive.

The Site job is getting easier as I get my head around all that has to be done in the totally unrealistic time frame that has been allocated to us. That said I am learning to say “Point taken” a lot when the client throws a wobbily and “Fok voord” confident that we will do the best we can given that fact that most of the important material is still been loaded on a ship in South Africa. (not our fault – thank God – but still becomes our problem that we must work around).

On the social side……. The client sponsored a golf day last Sunday and I dusted off the golf clubs and took on the Bogoso Course. Rather – it took me on. I played well until around hole 5 when I got tired. *chuckle* Jokes aside – the course is long! I scored the sum total of 14 points and that indicates how badly I played. I only used my one wood once!

I sweated buckets! Even after the cold shower I was still sweating.

Other social aspects – None!

From the newspapers! Considering I have 6 newspapers on my floor that I have not even had time to read – you will have to be content with a scan of the news:

I scanned the news!

There is nothing to report!


OH YES!!

There is news

Nessers sent me nekked pics *perk*

Esther offered to take nekked pics of Nessers and send them to me - Interesting fantasy that...

No-one else did anything

My right arm is sore!


Have fun everyone!! - I sure am!