The Mandetkene Boutique: Chapter 2

Building projects never seem to go as planned, and Mandetkene's boutique is no exception.

We had three major issues, sprinkled with a few suprises: The construction was supposed to be near completed when we arrived, and much to our surprise, ground hadn't even been broken when we got there! Then, at the end, there was misunderstanding between the contractor and the people overseeing the construction-- the contractor thought painting was not included, and almost quit the day before the store's opening when the store was still unpainted. Finally, we realized we had forgotten to plan for shelves, and scrambled the days before the opening to build and buy shelves!

Yoko elaborates:

At our first visit to the site, we did not see any "ongoing" constructions since the the parent's council had just decided where to have the boutique at that point. Then, the construction itself is further delayed due to that our contractor could not have those mud bricks dried during the rainy season.

This has been a problem throughout our project: basically, it is REALLY HARD TO STICK TO THE PLAN.  

 Alright, so our contractor decided that the weather is just too wet for dyring mudd bricks and hence we have to use cement. (Good idea but why couldn't they come up with this earlier? This is why the building wasn't started when we arrived). Anyhow, the construction with cement finally went on. The building of the boutique went quite smoothly from that point I would say, and a cement brick hut was built in two weeks. 

Boom! A store was thus built.

HOWEVER, we got anonther small surprise: the parent's council decided to make it bigger than our ORIGINAL PLAN  and  such a decision was made in our absence...

So now we have atwo-room boutique instead of a one-room boutique. It was surprising at first, but it actually really helps to have a stockroom

As we finished our summer camp, interviews, and inventory search, we decided to check on our physical boutique. And we found out that the building is FINISHED WITHOUT PAINTING!!!
BUT IT'S FINISHED!  SO IT'S FINISHED EVENTHOUGH IT'S UNFINISHED! 

Apparently, since the parent's council has decided to use the budget to further expand the store, they end up not having enough money to cover the paints. Consequently, we had to invest more money from our grant to have the store fully painted.
By the way, I recall this happened two days before the opening ceremony...

Also, during our visit, we found out that the store did not have shelves. Well, we did not really include this in the floor plan beforehand but we expected the contractor to take care of that since we are building a store. We should have planned better! But we found shelves and got the boutique all set for the opening.

Finally, on the day of the opening ceremony, our store was eventually in the shape of a REAL BOUTIQUE. Although we encountered many difficulties in the course, we are very happy about it. More space in the boutique means there will be more room for developments in the future.

Check out our adjoining post for a step by step photo journey of the store.

We will stop right here for this post but we will talk about our kids camp and more later! 

For photos, please click the link below:http://traveleatandlearn.blogspot.com/2017/08/photo-journey-of-mandetkene-boutiques.html

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