Walls going up!

May 11, 2008

The clinic walls are going up! And they seem to be going up quite high. Ten feet in fact. The far clinic wall is actually being built on top of the roof to the central supply building, whose wall abuts the clinic on one side. I decided this wall needed a window as they were building it, and it was done.

I also decided we needed a fair few electrical outlets, and that was done too. However, now it seems we have too many. I’ve never placed electrical outlets before and didn’t have any other skill to do it then thinking it looked fairly symmetrical and prettily spaced on paper. The construction workers were groaning as they carved out all the cinder blocks to put the outlets in place. It seems they happily missed placing three. I discovered that they had forgotten to place the water line for the toilet as well. That was only because I asked where they put the silver coil thingy on the side of the toilet. It seems they didn’t know because they had forgot to do it.

I got to spend last weekend in Quito with a different kind of shopping list. I checked out toilets “inodoros” and sinks, “lavamanos”, and facets, “griferias”, for the disabled bathroom. I can tell you that the standard size toilet in Ecuador is 38 inches from the floor to the toilet bowel. I, unfortunately was looking for a model that was 42- 45 inches tall. It happened that one of the stores had had an exhibition and a 45.5 inch toilet was actually found packed away in the ware house. How excited I was to find that toilet! I got a few strange looks as I went around with my tape measure, but in the end several people including the salesperson ended up borrowing it.