Construction Progress for the Fistula Clinic

I just returned from an overnight flight out east. Some of you have heard us talk about the new Fistula clinic that is being built by SIM and the World Wide Fistula Fund. This clinic will help bring physical healing to the growing group of women and girls suffering from chronic incontinence as a result of difficult childbirths. These women are outcasts in society because of this injury. Many are rejected by their husbands and left to rely on handouts from others for even their basic needs. The new Fistula clinic is being built in Danja where SIM has been running a leprosarium for over 50 years. As a result of the physical healing and the loving care of the staff at the clinic, the women will also have the opportunity to have their spiritual needs met.

We've been regularly flying our construction supervisor to Danja to help oversee each new step of the clinic construction. While we're there, we assist him in any way that we can. As you can see from the pictures, it is a very sandy, hot location. In the picture above, you see the driveway that runs down the middle of the property and connects the hospital end to the area where the staff housing is located.

This time, we headed out to the airport at 5:15 am and arrived in Danja mid-morning after a 2 hour 45 minute flight and a half hour drive from the nearest airport where we landed. After a brief visit with the family who hosts us, we headed out to look at the construction site. The clinic will be in a U shape with walk ways between the buildings. In this picture above, you can see the floor of the building that will house the operating room and then a walkway connecting it to the next building which will house a 40+ bed ward. These concrete floors were poured in the last few weeks on previous trips and are now covered with sand that is watered daily to help the concrete cure correctly. It is very difficult to keep the cement wet enough with the hot sun beating down on it each day and temperatures well above 100 deg F.

In this picture, you can see the floor of the ward. At the far end behind the first tree is the other side of the U with the administration building floor. The buildings in the background are part of the existing leprosarium.

Here's Chad (our construction supervisor) getting the work organized with the contractor in charge of the masons.

The task for this trip was to pour the floors for three other smaller building and the connecting walk ways. These buildings will house laundry facilities and bathrooms for the clinic and the staff. In North America, a cement pour of this size would be a pretty simple task with a cement truck and pumps to move the cement around. Here it is a very large undertaking. All the cement is mixed by hand and then moved into the right location by wheelbarrows. It's miserable trying to work as hard as the guys have to work during the day in the scorching sun. As a result, Chad likes to do these cement pours during the night. In the picture above you can see the wood forms and the rebarr metal for the floor. You can also see a few taller wood posts. They place these posts around the construction area and wire up fluorescent lights on the posts for the work that night.

45 men worked from 10 pm until 6 am pouring the floors of the three smaller buildings and the connecting walkways. They had 3 teams of guys mixing cement, about 13 guys hauling the cement in wheelbarrows and a team of masons.

Here are all the wheelbarrows ready for action that night.

Chad's other task that day was to lay out the lines so that the masons could start laying the cement blocks for the outer walls of the operating room building. Here he is making sure we placed the lines square. You can see the piles of cement blocks in this picture. There are 9,000 blocks of cement in those piles that will become the walls of these buildings. Each block was hand made by 2-3 men over the last month. They hand mixed the cement and poured it into one metal form to make a block at a time.

While Chad supervised the work throughout the night, I slept. The next morning we began the trip back with two stops along the way. The first leg was a 45 minute flight to our other hospital in Galmi to pick up two passengers. While we were there, Chad had a meeting to discuss the current construction project taking place there. They set a game plan for the next 6 months of that construction process. We then flew 35 minutes to another town, so that one of the passengers (our regional director for that part of the country) could take care of some business there for two hours. While he went into town, I visited with the traffic controller and airport director. I had a good discussion with the airport director, who we've known for a while now, about spiritual things. He has a lot of questions and is very open to discussing things. Pray that he'll understand the Truth and choose to follow it.

When the passenger returned from town, we took off to return to Niamey. By this time it was late afternoon, so we had to endure the bumps that come with flying in the afternoon during hot season. We climbed to 12,000 feet and were able to get above the worst of the bumps for the 1 hour 40 minute flight. After landing, we refueled the plane for our next flight, stopped by the police at the airport to turn in the form with the details of the flight and passengers, and then drove into the city. I dropped off the passengers at their homes and the guesthouse and arrived back at our house around 6:45 pm.