The Insanity of Coordinating Transport/Managing 2 Project Budgets

And managing two project budgets, and two projects, and all the stuff that goes along with it.

So I have now been in Suva for 2 weeks recovering from this nasty virus which laid me out flat. It’s officially negative for Dengue and Zika fevers which led the doctors to the conclusion that it was just a virus that had to run its course. Fair enough.

Being in the capital has provided me the opportunity to purchase materials and supplies for our village Composting Piggery (funded through the UNDP SGP-GEF program) that can’t be purchased in Levuka town (or can be purchased, but for an astronomical mark up in price).  Some of these things include, notebooks, pens, pencils, erasers, sharpeners, rulers, candy, rope, tape, stapler, professional printing of our manuals of instructions and FAQs about the pig composting process, professional printing of 6 posters that will be placed inside the piggery describing all aspects of the project, professional printing of sulu’s (aka sarongs) to promote and increase awareness and outreach about the project, and to print out worksheets, handouts, activities, and quizzes for our 5 training sessions associated with the piggery project. We also purchased 14 digging forks and spades as “prizes”, long thermometers to check the temperature of the compost piles, small gardening tools for the womens group home composting aspect of the project, paint, flagging tape for the biological monitoring aspect of the project, some gardening gloves, seeds, a wall clock for our village hall, garden nets to keep the birds out of certain crops, and mesh wire to place over 200 liter drums that will collect rain water at the pig pens.

some of our stationary supplies and notebooks, topped by a map that will be used by the Levuka Town Council in relocating our island rubbish dump

The sulu’s we designed for the village project to increase awareness and pride… I mean… I’m pretty proud of them!

Coordinating with Breakers RJS Fiji on the sulu design. These templates were used to make the screens to print the sulus

A lot. A lot of stuff. I had no idea how long I would be in Suva for, and so when I first came in I hit the ground running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to procure all of these items for the best prices in order to save some cash for the village to use in the future to construct a feeder road up to the main pen.  It was exhausting since I don’t live in Suva, to try to figure out which stores sell all the different things we needed. I think at the end of it, items were purchased from over 14 different stores.

The poster explaining the answers to Frequently Asked Questions… What if the pile is too wet? Too dry? Smells bad? etc. The background picture is actually our piggery!

Instructions for the main pig pen on how to do a composting pig waste process… These posters are huge and laminated so they can be placed directly in the piggery to answer questions as they arise.

Instructions on how to go from unfinished to finished composted pig wastes. For lack of a classier explanation… the pigs will poop in the compost until the last day so it cant be placed directly on crops or you will get sick, so it has to go through a second high-heat composting process to kill all the bacteria

The minimum each workshop participant will receive. A sulu, pen, pencil, Fijian composting pig waste manual, notebook, certificate, and a myriad of handouts, worksheets and quizzes (all in Fijian)

Well about a week ago I got a call from our new village headman (Turaga ni Koro) named Samu. He informed me that the village was in the process of hiring a flatbed truck to pick up all the materials for this project AND the water project that was funded through the Peace Corps Partnership Program. Well shoot! I hadn’t planned on getting all the materials for 2 projects during my time here!

Well I ran up to a water tank supply company in Laucala Bay just out of Suva with my amazing boss,  JC, to purchase 2- 10,000 liter water tanks and 1- 5,000 liter water tank for a discounted price. We haggled for a little while about what they had originally quoted us last month over the phone until the owners son came to the front (the one we had dealt with over the phone) to confirm the price we were telling them we had been quoted. An hour later and with $4,350 dollars less in my pocket, we headed back to downtown. We stopped off at the market to pick up some ivi (Polynesian Chestnuts) and guawa (guava) two of my favorite things about the January/February season. I then returned to the Peace Corps office to print off some of our worksheets and certificates for the training sessions for the piggery.

ivi (polynesian chestnut) and guawas

This entire week has been spent purchasing the last of the items needed for the piggery project, and then communicating back and forth with the village headman, the flatbed truck driver, and various people in the village about the materials we needed to procure, the timeline we had etc.

We were supposed to take the tanks on Wednesday (yesterday) to the village but the PC office wanted to keep me another night for medical reasons and to get results from the latest blood tests. Well I had called the truck driver and we agreed on going to Levuka on Thursday… but then Wednesday around 11am I got a call from him that he was at the water tank supply store and wanting to pick up the tanks! I had to explain the confusion and state again that we would be going on Thursday. Crisis momentarily averted.

So today it’s Thursday. The big day. Getting everything coordinated and back to the village! Woo!!!  So all morning its just dumping rain. I freak out momentarily thinking all of our booklets, worksheets etc will get soaked on the ride over, so I do some last minute re-shuffling and preparing. The truck pulls up at around 9:30 am and we find out he can put the cartons of things in the actual truck itself as opposed to sitting outside.  Wonderful. So we take trips up and down the stairs grabbing all the cartons and placing them in the truck, then we load the digging forks in the bed of the truck.

So we are off again to Laucala Bay to pick up the water tanks. On the way up we receive a phone call that due to the poor weather conditions, the ferry to Levuka had been cancelled for today. We get there and lo and behold there is a problem with the tanks. Keep in mind we paid for the tanks in full the prior week. We get there and the secretary tells us that their mold for the 10,000 liter tanks broke. They sent their truck to pick up some 10,000 liter tanks for us to the Western side of the island and that the truck is currently stranded due to the flooded rivers and heavy rain. AKA no tanks. Thank god the ferry was cancelled! After a fair amount of complaining about why she didn’t call either me or the driver at any point in the past week to explain this to us, she says that they will order the part to fix their mold from Kasabias, a local hardware store, have the crew stay overnight, and have the tanks ready for us to take by tomorrow when we go for the ferry. Praises.  So we leave there empty handed.

The tropical depression that is causing some severe flooding and heavy rain… parts of fiji have already gotten over 100ml of rain today

We then stop off at Vinod Patel in Nabua to pick up the rest of the materials for the water project, 6, 2″ Brass Gate Valves, 10 lengths of 2″ Pressure Pipe, 2kgs of PVC Solvent Cement Glue, some joints, and 35 lengths of 2″ Class C PVC pipe. Well everything here is in metric so 2″ is 50mm. The people at Vinod Patel must have heard me say 15mm instead of 50mm PVC class C pipes and I didn’t realize the mistake until we ended up back in downtown Suva. Angst.

So tomorrow… we have to go pick the tanks… go to Vinod Patel and exchange the wrong pipes for the right pipes, get on the ferry, cross to the village and deliver all the materials for these two projects.

It has been an insane two weeks of running around but I’m glad its nearly over and that all the materials will be safe and sound in the village soon.