A Game of Two Halves (First Half)

It was inevitable that I'd title a post with a football analogy at some point. There are two reasons for this slightly unnecessary turn of phrase: one is that I stayed up until 4.30am to watch my beloved Man Utd crash out of the Champion's League quarter final to Bayern Munich last night; the other, more redeeming reason is that it is incredibly apt. The two weeks that have passed since my last post have seen us reach our lowest point since our arrival in the country and, immediately after, our highest. A fortnight of two weeks, if you will. A lot is written about how volunteering represents a watershed moment in the lives of the volunteer, likewise the idea of 'finding oneself' on a trip around south-east Asia has become cliche in the UK. While there is serious evidence of that on show here almost everyday (and I hope coming through in this blog) I want to give as honest a representation of life with All Hands, and in the Philippines, as possible, and that includes some of the not-so-pleasant day to day realities. As the worst week came before the best, I will open with a series of slightly less glamorous stories. 

I have also gained access to the photographic collection of lots of our friends on project for this post, so I'll be filling it with pictures. 

Around three weeks ago we had been dealing with a long series of horrendous downpours, coming intermittently up to six times a day. Rain in the Philippines is a completely different beast to rain in the UK; rolling over at a moment's notice, it can switch from baking heat and perfect sunshine to tropical storm in the blink of an eye.

A row of our temporary shelters in Santo Nino (thanks to Jedd Sankar-Gorton for the photo).

The rain would typically last for ten to fifteen minutes and then stop as suddenly as it began. The result of this was that our work site in Santo Nino (my favourite photo of which is above) became a mud pit.  We had to call the working day to a premature end on more than one occasion because conditions underfoot were making working on slippery ladders or coco lumber incredibly unsafe. It even became a hazard to use our wooden handled hammers as they could so easily (and regularly did) slip out of one's hand on the backswing! While it was irritating beforehand, the situation intensified on the Tuesday of that week when we made the realisation that our septic tank, located directly under the community centre we call home, had been continually flooding with rain water and, subsequently, overflowing.  What we thought was mud turned out to have been grossly contaminated, and we had to act fast. What followed was four hours of digging drainage ditches through our back yard to funnel the rivers of contaminated water away from our home. Every member of the organisation, administrative staff included, got involved and, somehow, we made it fun as we lay over four tonnes of gravel in two hours in an attempt to create sanitary pathways to walk on, to avoid the mud. We had the added joy of the delivery truck sinking into the saturated earth and needing to be pushed to safety by a group of already overstretched volunteers. It was a brutal afternoon's work, and we ended up continuing long after our regular stopping time of 4.30pm and finishing our day in the dark, exhausted and, quite literally, covered in excrement. 

Digging ditches in our back yard, 

Digging out the delivery truck. I swear I actually did some work and didn't just stand around... Honest. 

Work returned to normal on Wednesday and Thursday as we continued to work on our shelters but the peace didn't last long as I had to take a trip to Tacloban's Divine Word Hospital on Thursday to be treated for turned out to be a relatively uninteresting allergic reaction to an ant bite.  The experience of going to hospital with a big swelling on your leg (no photos, regrettably) in a language you don't speak and in a city rebuilding from a massive natural disaster is a scary one, but there was very little drama in reality. Volunteers, for better or worse, are given priority in hospitals in the Philippines, by way of gratitude. Jumping the queue and being told not to pay for my consultation felt a little uncomfortable but I was not given the option and it meant that we were in and out of the entire process within twenty minutes.

We returned to base to the devastating news that construction had been abruptly halted midway through the afternoon. To give a little background, the site that we are working on has been provided as a result of a negotiation between the city government and another NGO called Operation Blessing (hereon OB). The deal in place is that OB will fund the project and provide materials, while the city will organise the labour. Before the involvement of AHV, the team of engineers was seriously low on numbers, so we were brought in to bolster their work force. The architect who had designed the buildings visited the site at the request of AHV to take a look at a few concerns that our site managers had about the design. We were confronted by an incredibly angry German missionary, furious to find that his plans were not being brought to fruition. The structures he designed utilise cutting edge disaster relief techniques, forming a primary structure that could withstand another typhoon of the same scale, minimising the need for large scale rebuilds in the future. Damaged walls and roofs are cheaper and easier to repair, which would allow families to be independent in repairing their homes. These disaster relief / architectural techniques are not even being taught in universities yet and Jenny and our site manager, the excitable Scot that he is, have been transformed into a pair of gushing nerds on multiple occasions. It transpired that there had been a major miscommunication between the city engineers, AHV and OB's team of architects and designers which meant that we had been unknowingly building substandard shelters that would not conform to the specifications of the drawings. Our month's work was hanging in the balance between the best case scenario of major tweaking, and a worst case of needing to completely deconstruct and rebuild.

Just as the houses were beginning to look  good, a major redesign was in order. (Note how the local workers don't wear shoes or use ladders.)

A series of meetings between AHV and the other organisations behind the build was called for the following day which meant that we were forced to find work elsewhere. Fortunately a site was found in the city which required a lot of people and very few tools. So began the next stage of project Tacloban. The rebuild section of the project has always been intended to be one of many AHV programmes taking place in the city and our assessment team had spent much of the week finding work in the worst hit areas of town.  We were taken on the Friday to one of these sites, to begin work clearing rubble and debris, retrieving personal and/or salvageable items, and leveling the plot of a group of houses.

Storm clouds loom over the plot of land we were challenged to clear.
Twelve days later, work is almost completed.

The final two days of the week were spent on this site.  We are yet to complete work here, but have, so far, cleared and cleaned ten rooms, deconstructed every compromised wall and salvaged everything from ID cards, teddy bears and a watch, frozen in time having stopped at 11.20 on November 8th, 2013. It is an immensely emotional experience to search through the remnants of somebody's home and, at the end of such a stressful week, it simultaneously provided perspective and pushed us to tipping point. Despite our visits to the communities along the coast, this was the first time we had been so exposed to the devastation on a personal level. Bodies are still being found in Tacloban with regularity and conversations were had within the group about the possibility of uncovering a corpse after we were informed of a suspicion held by the locals, which had prompted them to alert the necessary authorities. After a group discussion about the potential emotional impact of such a discovery, as well as of AHV protocol, every single member of the team opted to continue working on the site. One of the stand out elements of life with AHV is that the team remains united seemingly regardless of circumstance, and this was no exception. The plot of land is owned by two brothers, one of whom introduced himself to Jenny with the words: 'Have you found any bodies yet? Lots of children were found along this stretch.' Incredibly he still managed to raise a smile as he told the story of saving a 'very large, naked' woman who had become trapped in the rubble - 'she is healthy, and eternally grateful!' The scenes that unfolded on November 8th will never leave those who witnessed them, and he still dreams every night of a piece of tin roof, propelled by the wind, instantly killing a man before his eyes.

We continued to work for the brothers until Wednesday when Jenny began work on a new house, as team leader, leaving me to complete work on this site. Building relationships with the people you are helping is the high point of this kind of work and both Jenny and myself have been able to grow relatively close to our respective beneficiaries. It was these relationships, coupled with the incredibly tight bonds that have developed within the AHV team that brought about a massive change in mood for the following week.

The bigger the hammer, the happier I am.

Jen's nemesis, conquered by hand, was a twenty foot tree, fallen across the plot of land, destroying everything beneath it. It took almost two full days of sawing to remove.

We are currently on our second mental health break, but the second half will be posted as soon as possible.