What can we expect to find?
[Introducing: Jenny Burns: All Hands Volunteers veteran, voice of reason, logistics expert, co-traveller and, now, fellow 195+ contributor. Taking these roles in her stride, she has written about her previous experiences with the charity and given a far more detailed idea of what we can look forward to in just over two week's time. Her posts will hereby be highlighted by this clever change in font and text colour. Over to Jenny.]
The accommodation that AHV provided in 2012 is all I have to
base my knowledge on, but from photographs I think we're looking at a very
similar set up. It'll be pretty basic, they prioritise the volunteers’
safety, obtaining a secure building with plenty of space. The bedrooms
are shared, with up to 15 volunteers per room, sleeping on bunk beds.
The toilets are western but currently without running water, so you have
to gain great skills with bucket flushing! The showers are usually outdoor
cubicles, built by the staff and early volunteers. Each volunteer is allocated
one bucket of water a day with which to shower. Maybe I should consider cutting
my hair a little shorter! We're pretty spoilt with a lady employed by AHV to do our washing every day; considering the amount of dirt that you get on
your clothes, this is such a luxury to have done for you.
Our working days are pretty rigid, everyone is woken up at 6.15am,
you're expected to be ready for work at 6.45am and woe betide you if you're not
on the jeepney when it leaves at 7.15am! The jeepneys were one of my
favourite things of my last trip. They're old American army vehicles that
were left in the Philippines and are now the main public transport
method. They're painted in the most incredible colours and have benches
down the sides of the interior but people tend to ignore the seating rules and
sit on the top, cling to the side or whichever position that will get them on
the vehicle!
Three meals are provided every day; for breakfast there is tea,
coffee, fruit, breads and spreads, while both lunch and dinner consist of rice
and a meat and vegetable dish. My memories of this are good, of course
there’s always going to be something that takes you by surprise but you're
usually so hungry that it all tastes incredible! A special treat last
time was a man who sold ice creams from the back of his bike, it didn't take
him long to realise that arriving at the same time every day to the volunteer
base would ensure him good business!
All accommodation, food and transport are provided to the
volunteers for free, which is the reason I initally chose AHV as a charity to work
for. They really look after their volunteers and this is the reason for
Robbie and I setting up the Just Giving page, to try to contribute towards how
much we will cost them.
But believe me, we will be working for this privilege! From 7.15 -
11.30 in the morning and 13.00 - 16.30 in the afternoon, 6 days a week, we
will be doing hard manual labor. In 2012 I spent most of my time clearing the
mud out of people's houses, often knee-high and full of the abandoned belongings
of the family that had to leave their home until it could be made habitable again.
This allowed me to get to know families really well and I made the most amazing
friends. I spent days working for a lovely lady called Liza, working in her
child's bedroom that was half underground and therefore especially full of
mud. I stood on a bed frame with a head torch on as I scraped enough mud
out of the room to be able to lift the old curtains off the floor. The following
day, I sifted through a pool of watery mud looking for her Uncle's wrestling
belt, the only memento of his life that he really wanted to salvage. We
never found it.
It isn't just mud that causes problems for families. Houses that look
clean are sometimes even more of a risk. Another job that I did a lot was
'Decon', which involved a sledgehammer and crow bar! Mud can creep up the
insides of walls, or water can settle in the ceiling and cause serious
hazards. My job was to take apart furniture and then pull off wall paneling
and ceilings to expose the primary structure. This meant that mud can be
cleared and moisture dried to salvage the structure rather than allowing it to
deteriorate further. My main memories of this include being laughed at
for the 'excessive' amount of safety gear I had on and then watching as
cockroaches fell out the ceiling onto people's faces - there's a reason for
eye goggles if ever I saw one! It's also a pretty good stress
relief. You can’t always like everyone on base and I certainly got a lot better
with a sledgehammer as I took out my frustrations with a particular girl on an
unsuspecting sink. It needed to come out anyway, I promise!
As a project evolves and the initial clearing has been done, rebuilding
begins to take place. AHV completed their biggest rebuild yet in
Cagayan de Oro, Philippines, in the time after I left that project.
Hopefully Robbie and I will get the chance to be part of rebuilding the city of
Ormoc too, but we cannot possibly comprehend the scale of the devastation till
we get out there and how long it will take to get to that stage.
The structure of our days may sound a little monotonous, and I suppose
when you've been shoveling mud for hours, barely making a dent in the vast
amount, it can be. However, my favourite moments with AHV are the
unpredictable ones. One night, as we sat eating dinner, the heavens
opened and a mighty storm started. Suddenly people came running to the
volunteers, screaming that the 'Tent City' (where a lot of the people had been
relocated) was flooding. The idea that people who had lost nearly
everything should be put through any more was just unbelievable, so we all
grabbed spades and ran. That night was spent digging trenches through the
network of tents to guide the water to larger channels to drain away.
Every now and again the direction of the flow became unclear, it was very dark,
and so, Travis, a volunteer from Texas, folded a crisp packet into a boat and
its movement along our little tributaries defined the direction of digging for
the rest of the evening!
Another day I came back to base to find 4
trucks parked outside full of toilets. 2000 toilets! They had been
ordered for the previously mentioned new development AHV were involved
in, but had arrived a long time before they could be fitted! There was a queue
of volunteers at the first open truck and a badly constructed wooden crate
holding two porcelain toilets was being handed to each volunteer. The
only way to carry this from the truck to the growing pile of toilets was on
your head. I have to say that people who carry things on their heads have
an incredibly strong neck! Balancing two toilets on the top of your head is not
an easy task, but no one shirked the job. We queued in circles until every one
of the 2000 toilets was stacked up in the secure compound we lived in.
Those toilets are now in the new houses built for those people who lost their
homes in Typhoon Washi that swept through the island of Mindanao in December
2011.
It's easy to reminisce about 2012. It was a trip that changed what I
wanted to do with my life. I went out there in the hopes of assisting the
architect AHV had hired for their rebuild. I had just finished my
Architecture undergraduate degree, was unemployed and uninspired and was hoping
this would shake things up. I left having completely abandoned
Architecture, moving entirely towards the charity sector and have since had jobs
(always voluntary) in Senegal for a Women's empowerment organisation and in
London for a charity that work in health and education in Iraq. I'm by no
means expecting this trip to change Robbie's life plans so dramatically, but I
do hope we get to experience more anecdotes such as these and are able to share
them here.
