New lab spaces

I realize I uploaded these pictures a few days ago and never wrote the post...these are from a few weeks back when we (the science faculty) were unpacking the first shipment of boxes for the labs. It was very exciting! Needless to say, we still don't have everything we originally ordered, but we're making progress and I've been able to have a couple introductory labs with the supplies I have....
Here are a couple photos of the labs when they were completely empty:

As you can see, there's a nice classroom space in 1/3 of the space and lab benches in the rest of the room.
Just this week, they installed the fume hoods and here is the worker chipping a hole in the brick wall for the exhaust pipe. Notice he's standing on my teaching table and isn't wearing shoes. But he's standing on a piece of cardboard so he doesn't get it dirty. And then proceeded to leave all the chipped concrete all over the floor and most of his lunch leftovers for the cockroaches and ants to help themselves to.
Obviously, the fit of the exhaust pipe isn't exactly perfect because he used a dull chisel and a hammer to bang a hole through cheap 3rd-world wall structure. So despite all our efforts to keep mosquitos out, we are thwarted at every turn.

The unpacking was fun only because a lot of what they sent us was "baby sized". Here's our autoclave (the volume inside is considerably smaller than the outside would even suggest) that should sterilize about 2 (small) pieces of labware at a time.....
And our toy-sized dissecting microscope:
The microscopes have been a source of controversy--the original set they sent were literally toys. I had a similar or possibly better quality version when I was 10. They had mirrors instead of light sources and you could hardly see a 10x image through the optics. We're still waiting on some more usable versions for the biology labs, but we had some good laughs over what they originally sent.....you have to laugh in these situations because otherwise it would be very depressing. Now it's almost six weeks into the semester and the biology students haven't looked through a microscope yet!
And baby-sized human skeleton model....
These photos are of the two biology professors. We have sent all this equipment back to be replaced by "real" lab equipment.

Here are the chemistry professors unpacking and inventorying the chemical stock. The indented space in the wall is now where the fume hood is installed. But it is also baby-sized and only takes up about half the width of the space:
And a couple more of random fun box-unpacking.
It was very dirty weekend work, the boxes were very dusty and musty and some of the glassware literally had colonies of insects living in them which is why we're all wearing our non-teaching clothes.


Now that we've unpacked the initial load of supplies and have settled into teaching a little more, it's starting to feel functional, but we're still waiting on a lot of basic equipment....like a periodic table poster for instance! And even though the water that comes out of the taps is cloudy and brown (not just a little bit, but very cloudy and very brown--like a muddy river almost), I've run one successful lab so far and have another planned for this week! When we get better equipment in, I plan to test the brown water to see if we can figure out what's in it......