The Foundation

Since I am waiting on my container paperwork to finish processing I decided to go ahead and start building the chicken coup at Newsteps where I am staying. I originally planned to do a small poultry project with about 20 chickens for laying eggs. But upon arriving my views on the chicken coup changed since eggs are a very good selling item in the market and all of the boys seemed really interested in having chickens, so much so that they thought 100 would be a good number to start with! I decided to step it up to 50 and build a chicken coup that will have room to expand later if we are able to easily sell all of the eggs that we are producing with 50 chickens. The coup is going to be 40 ft by 20 ft and 7ft high, we are making the foundation of the walls with stone and brick 3 layers high and then will use 1x12’s and some really nice metal mesh that I picked up at the garage sale I mentioned last week. Yesterday we laid the foundation and today we did the brick work and the boys really enjoyed doing the concrete work. 

Oxford (the guy using the level) is my operations manager and has taken the lead on this project and I have been very impressed with his knowledge of how to set up a building foundation and the speed at which the building is coming together.

I made some of the trips to get sand, bricks, and rock with a friend in a small Toyota Dump truck. These trips can be quite an experience trying to find the right blocks and rocks to use and then its always a negotiation for the price each time we find what we are looking for. On one trip the latch on the dump bed broke and we had to stop by a welding shop to have it fixed. Welders here wear Dolce & Gabana knock off sunglasses for eye protection and usually have on flip flops, basketball shorts and a jersey of some sort, I have yet to see a welding helmet in this country. His welds surprisingly looked decent on the truck bed and they used good metal plates to patch it all up. Only in Africa.

Jesi is here now and it is good catching up on what we have been up to the past few weeks. I cooked up some biscuits and gravy and omelets for breakfast, and for a moment it was like being back in Oklahoma. Oxford came in and I made him a plate of biscuits and gravy and the look on his face when he tasted it was priceless. You know the look, the I want to spit this out but to be polite I am going to choke it down and smile…Solomon was next to try and well he wasn’t so shy about it he ran out to the lawn and spit it out! Me and Jesi thought it was delicious!