Johan’s diary – 16th of September
6:00 I wake up to the hustle, and bustle of a low-flying aircraft, but I fall back asleep.
7:15 I wake up to the clock. I slept well but not so great the last hour, otherwise slept really well last night. Now for breakfast, it is rice porridge with strawberries and coffee, had also bought mango juice that tasted excellent. Emailed a bit too.
8:30 Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the construction engineer to come to today’s meeting, I talk with Johan Friman a while, the engineer here is fairly punctual, but no Karma. We start anyway. He has a good suggestion on construction but I am clearly worried about the price tag, it will be too expensive.
10:30 I message the outcome of today’s meeting to Sophie and indeed becomes the spontaneous reaction that we will not cope. I go off to try my luck at an ATM, it does not go as I planned, but finally manages to get the money I need. I even go to Karma to regulate our financial dealings. I am buying lots of Nepalese flags and other little things for the charity gala in his shop.
13:30 I am back at the hostel again, and have a meeting over Skype with Sophie and Torbjörn about how we should proceed with the construction, the meeting has good results in that I book my ticket home in the evening to Friday evening instead, and that I should have a new meeting with the engineer in the morning to get a new proposal pertaining to the financial parameters we have set today.
15:00 I am booking my ticket home and working on miscellaneous administrative tasks. There have been power outages.
16:00 Do I need to move my body a little bit so I go up on the roof of the hostel and run a small workout, I feel that I lost a little the last time so there may be an increased exercise dose, when I’m home in Sweden again. Hits Johan and Helene, and little reason with them about their experience of construction in Nepal, interesting and useful exchange that I take with me into tomorrow’s meeting with the building engineer. I have a shower and the opportunity to shave when the water today is almost lukewarm, really nice with cool shower when today it is about 30 degrees and quite humid.
17:00 I work on sorting the images from Ratankot and realize that I have not reported much about the situation in the village. It has happened in a positive way that the village has had many tunnel houses (see picture day) built instead of the leaking shacks or tents but this is not a long-term solution.
The school is running but is conducted in a tent, which is also not a long-term solution.
The rice fields are only sown to about 50%, which will mean major food shortages in the winter, clearly worrying because rice is the staple food.
Corn harvest seems to have been ok. No real house is being built and when I examine why it turns out that no one has the money to start rebuilding their homes, for normal families, it will take 15 to 25 years before they can afford to build a simple little three-room house, contributions from the Nepal state is about 2,000 Swedish kronor per family, which is not enough even for here.
But Shyams little “Mobile Clinic” helped the villagers very much, and I thank everyone who helped fill the medicine supply again this time.
19:00 Now for dinner, I had some stew and tasted great.
19:30 The power is back on, take the opportunity to download the computer and writes my diary.
21:00 Thought I would upload some pictures on Facebook tonight so I work to sort out the best and start charging, hope you find them interesting!
Good night Sweden and the rest of the world, it was all from me today!