Why I Don't Sleep These Nights

It isn't often that I express frustration here at CHoP, but the fact of the matter is that these days are frustrating

On Thursday I went through the registry of those who received applications and compared them against those who returned their forms. Many people have not returned them. This makes our job extremely difficulty because we don't know exactly how many rooms to prepare, how many proctors to have on hand (called invigilators here), etc. I have have the help of Christopher, a youth from the parish, who has been a great help making calls, etc. We don't have adequate facilities or quite enough work yet for me to employ a full-time secretary, and he's very thorough and generous. We're figuring out exactly how many people will be here -- but it's meant a lot of phone calls. (I'm glad I asked for a registry of sales).

I left for the OLQP site yesterday at 8:00 a.m. and returned last night at 6:30 p.m. It was a long day. What did I learn? Well one thing is that my constant harping about provisions for water is now finally being heeded. I really had thought that folks were on top of this, that workers would arrive, put tanks on top of the buildings, connect them to pipes from the large tanks at our bore hole, and that we'd be in business. No such luck. More proximate tanks have first to be built near the buildings. Which means that the holes have to be dug, the concrete poured and cured..... What is clear is that not only is the idea of a Pre-Form One Session for students not likely; now a 8 January start is beginning to look elusive. I've already signed two teacher contracts for a November 1 start, having been assured, etc -- so we'll have to figure out how to employee the teachers without students.

As we toured the site yesterday with consultants, engineers, contractors, etc, we stopped by the laboratory to see a sample of a lab bench. Thank goodness for the Jesuit regent here. He asked how many people per bench. Answer: 8. How many benches in the room? 4. Now here is where difficult arithmetic comes in: 8 x 4 = ? Yep, still 32. And from the very beginning what number of students has everyone know the rooms are to be built to accommodate? 35.

I asked our architect and engineer whether our teachers would choose by lottery which 3 students would not receive laboratory experience and whether it would be on a weekly or annual basis. They'd known about this issue for sometime and didn't mention it. I had brought up the inadequacy of the design after the visit of Fr. Joseph Afulo, who had taught science as a regent at Loyola High School and who noted the design issue immediately. I was was assured at the time that everything was well-thought out, etc.

I was furious yesterday and found it difficult to keep a lid on it. We began to look for solutions. Can we pop out walls? Can we do this? Can we do that? A look of horror descended upon the professionals in the group when I mentioned, "Of course, the client can't be held financially responsible for labour and material costs for correcting such a grievous error in design?"

As the others walked in circles trying to figure out how to deal with the issue of making a curved wall square, I took a walk to cool down. And a perfect solution hit me. It will in fact provide a better design. We'll use classrooms in the Phase II wing for laboratories, and use the laboratories for other classrooms. This itself will take some creativity, but it is the best we can do, I think. We'll work some more on it, but this is the most practicable solution I think.

There were some design issues with the Jesuit Residence, too. Some misplaced windows, lack of ventilation, lack of emergency egress. On our part, we didn't provide for a place to put our car keys, mailboxes, community bulletin board, etc. The result is that we will now have an attractive entry way from our garage where we will keep these things.

A frustrating but ultimately rewarding day. It reminded me of Tony DeMello's story, "Good Luck. Bad Luck. Who Knows?"