Your 2022-23 HundredX Dollars at Work: Building the Surgery Center!

We are off to a great start on our Surgery Center! After two years of fundraising, we’ve broken ground and are raising the walls on this incredible project.

I really want to give a shout out to the many people who made it possible to start building our surgery center. In September 2022, 268 people participated in taking surveys through HundredX and in 2023, that number grew to 298. In addition to giving feedback for dollars, 113 people have donated 160 gifts towards this project! I LOVE when we work together! Many times we think we can’t do big things or give big gifts, but together we can and we are!

In June 2024, we broke ground in a beautiful ceremony that included members from the local church, communities, support groups, chiefs and government. We reminisced back to the time when we first envisioned this medical work and how God gave us showers of blessings as we prayed over the land and the vision he put on our hearts. One of the speeches that really surprised me was from one of the chiefs, Senior Group Chief Mphita, while remembering the many things we wanted to see happen at the Grace Center.

“I didn’t believe it could happen. But now I’m seeing all these things come to fruition. It is really exciting for our community.” Senior Group Chief Mphita

Those first few hits with the hoe didn’t make much of a dent in the ground!

It just took the strong arms of some incredible men and women to actually break the ground and get some trenches dug into this conglomerate clay/rock base.

By the end of June, the trenches were finished and we were ready to build the foundation!

All the dirt dug out of the trenches goes back into the foundation and gets pounded down to make it very firm. With the mixture of rock and clay in our soil here, the inspection engineer said it was better than a road base under our foundation.

Pouring the slab took time as every wheelbarrow of cement was mixed by hand. It was one person’s job to count every bag of cement, every barrow of sand, every bucket of water to insure the cement mix was exactly perfect and the same every time.

Representatives from the committee overseeing the project and the contractor building the Surgery Center. This is an incredible group to work with and I’m so thankful for their hard work and diligence.

By mid-July 2024, we were ready to begin on the walls!

August 1, 2024 — we are two months into our building project now and things are moving right along! It is incredible to see this taking shape and knowing that soon we’ll be providing a greatly needed service in our community.

August 12, 2024: With the walls completed to the tops of the windows, the workers now set up the forms for the concrete ring beam that will surround the entire building.