Settling In
Li Bai was a member of the Chinese peacekeeping force and had his own quarters in the camp.
Since Sun Fatty had been away on business for a long time, helping with agricultural development in Somalia, the double room he shared with Li Bai was basically no different from a single room.
John Samus, the former head of the Samos Family, and his bodyguards had returned with Li Bai. They could stay temporarily in the Chinese peacekeeping force's camp for a few days, but a military camp was no hotel. It couldn't accommodate outside guests for long, even if plenty of rooms were vacant.
Li Bai had a solution, though. He called out, and a hundred or so strong young local men immediately got to work two hundred meters outside the camp gates.
They had no skills, were stupid and clumsy, and loved to slack off. None of that mattered when there were so many of them. Ten men could do one man's job; if the quality wasn't there, they made up for it with quantity. Besides, they were cheap, and the work would get done eventually.
More than a hundred men pitched in to level and pave the ground, raise red-brick load-bearing pillars, build walls from hollow bricks, and put up a roof of white corrugated steel sheets and welded angle iron. They also fenced the place with wire mesh, dug a few garden beds, and built two courtyards, one large and one small.
The two houses, simple single-story buildings with sloping roofs in their respective courtyards, required little skill and were easy to build. They were finished in just over a week, with water and electricity hooked up, too.
The house in the larger courtyard had seven rooms: four bedrooms, two living rooms, and a shared