Summer is Here

Spring is having a battle with Summer. Flowers are out, most of the trees have filled out with leaves, and days are getting hot. But, once in a while, Spring comes through with a delightfully cool morning. Which is how today began, and it must be an omen for what will surely be a crazy Independence Day celebration here in Lesotho (Lesotho gained independence on October 4th, 1966 after 92 years of being a British protectorate).

I forgot my running shoes at work on Friday because I was so excited for the week to be done, so I came into work this morning to fetch them and thought I'd write a quick post after taking some time off.

I'll start with a work update, because that's what consumes most of my time. We received bids for the first phase of construction for the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation projects back in early August. The phase consists of 80 rural water supply systems and accompanying Ventilated Improved Pit Latrines, about 8700 of them. Those 80 schemes were then broken into 28 Lots, for which we received 24 bids. Three team members and I spent the next 5 weeks evaluating bids and producing a 1300 page report recommending award of the 28 Lots to 16 qualified bidders. MCA and MCC both cleared the report and we are now preparing contracts that will be sent to recommended bidders next week. All that to say that in the next two weeks we should have signed 16 contracts worth USD 16.9 million and in the following month we will handover the 80 sites for construction to start. It should be a frantic and exciting time.

So, my last 10 weeks in country will fly by with meetings and trainings and site visits and reports and, hopefully, it will go smoothly. Regardless, all of my tasks will be handed over to my counter-part roundabouts December 10th, I'll close my service on December 15th and catch a flight back to the US on the 16th or 17th. It's too far away to have a retrospective, but stay-tuned.

There will be lots of pictures as construction starts, so hold your horses.