Facility

Met the Professor this morning to take a trip out to a ground-breaking ceremony. We are funding the building of a cold storage facility here in Tikrit, and the work crew had just begun digging for the foundation. This is connected to our previous 'tomato' discussion; building cold storage facilities allows farmers and wholesalers to store perishable goods prior to getting them to market. It's a relatively straightfoward project- not too expensive, right down the road and thus easy to monitor. And visible. Trucks roll in with fruit. Fruit stays cold. Trucks roll out. Easy to take pictures of, and prove that everyone is doing what they say they will do. I tried to get into more details with the Professor about how it was going to be run- the allocation of space, how much charge per square meter, operating costs and supervision. Those details got fuzzy. We've built a lot of stuff here, but the real measure of success is the systems put in place to properly use the stuff. This is the hard part, and frankly where a lot of our failures have been in this reconstruction. I imagine Field of Dreams...If you build it, they will come...but you'll have to watch them play a couple of baseball games just to make sure you built the right thing and they came for the right reason...