Coffee Shop #2

Today is Thursday, April 12, 2012. Tomorrow I begin teaching so this is my last day of leisure. It was a cold rainy day, but I decided to venture out and travel across town to the Aloha for my favorite hamburger, with a hot juicy pineapple slice and other trimmings, for lunch and then on to our new coffee shop that should have been open months ago to see how construction was progressing. What I saw was tension between two cultures and two time periods and the results were not what I hoped to see.

I have physically built four homes and worked on several others and have learned much about the kind of construction going on at the coffee shop and the importance of sequencing and scheduling your work. Last summer when I built an addition on Jon’s home I listed all the tasks that had to be completed, determined the start and end date for each. That list created an urgency of doing each task in time and in the proper order. Constant pressure was kept on subcontractors to be on the job when the schedule called for them. When all of this is done properly with the right supervision the project runs like a well-oiled machine and the results are usually as expected.

The eastern culture doesn’t work this way. Organization and scheduling is missing, along with any urgency of getting things done. Inspectors were not interested in requiring work to be at code level, but instead were looking for payment to overlook substandard work. Several months were lost because we were not willing to make those payments at the risk of customer safety. To do the work correctly was not profitable for the inspectors and required us to bring in an outside firm with enough clout to deal with this corruption and insure us that these inspectors would not bother us in the future. Fighting this corruption to obtain quality work was time consuming and expensive, but it set a standard to accompany our faith.

Our coffee shop is located near a western hotel so that we can provide some services for them. It was important that our design have a western look and finish to it, but that presented a real problem in a city like this where western style is just now becoming more popular. Workers do not have experience creating this style and cannot visualize it in their minds. They don’t have the tools either. I saw tools being used at the coffee shop that my dad had in the farm shop that were 100 years old. They were our antiques. Here they are still in use.

As I walked around and looked at the work already done and saw how they were doing the current work, I felt more and more discouraged. I really felt sorry for the general contractor because he was trying to do a job that was beyond his experience level. As I looked the work over he watched me and he knew that I knew what was wrong and what was yet to be done that should have been done before. Some critical pieces of work were not done earlier because they didn’t know how or more likely it was inconvenient to do at the time. This undone work is going to be very difficult to do later and will be the first thing to require maintenance in the future.

I was asked how long I thought it would be before they would finish. Would two weeks be long enough? I didn’t want to tell them the truth, but I said, “In this culture with these workers, if you finish this project correctly you might get in by June. I really don’t think they will ever completely finish the project, but will move in when they can’t get any more work done in a reasonable time frame.

In my mind this project was rather unique and included some things I think you will find interesting. I took some pictures and will use them for illustration in another blog entry.

As I finish this blog entry, I want to make it clear that this coffee shop is going to be nice and it will be functional and it will be used to touch many lives. They should be proud to have an establishment like they will have in that location. It is now our job to pray that this establishment be a tool to be used to impact the lives of people in a very unique way for eternity.