Integration

Monday Feb. 8, 2010

Day one at Tree of Life Health Post

Amazing progress on the jobsite welcomed the team from Woodmen Valley Chapel as we arrived at the construction site on Monday morning. The contractor and his crew had obviously been working diligently to prepare the footings and pillars that will allow the team to begin laying concrete blocks. After some rest to recover from jet lag that was mostly negated by the late hour required to watch the Superbowl, the team was still itching to get their hands dirty. Reverend Theo Asare met the team and showed them a short tour of the Theovision headquarters before we started. I love the sign he has on his desk that says, "Make no small plans here." Indeed, the Tree of Life Health Post day clinic , situated directly beside the Theovision headquarters, is the fruit of this type of thinking. We met the jobsite foreman and began the process of integrating ourselves into the workflow. This process didn’t go great the first day and there were many awkward moments as we tried to learn to work together with the Ghanaian crew. I learned a few names and was glad to discover that many were familiar to me—Sylvester, Foster, Ebenezer, Frank—with a few Kofu and Rasheed type names mixed in. All are said with a strong accent so often it is hard to figure out someone's name. It is some consolation that they are no better at pronouncing our names.