"It's more fun in the Philippines"

I write this post from a hotel in the city of Ormoc having completed week one of our three month stay on base in Kananga, about an hour up the road. We have had to travel this far to obtain (very sketchy) WiFi and we have lots to do today in town so I will apologise now if the formatting and editing isn't top notch. Blogging is really stretching the capabilities of my phone! 

Jenny and I travelled from Heathrow to Manila on Thursday / Friday and after our 14 hour flight, stopped for a night in the capital. I was immediately hit by the heat, the sprawl and the complete cultural overhaul my mind had to adjust to, a process that took me a solid three days to undergo and may not even be over yet.

The typhoon damage does not stretch as far north as Manila, nor as West as Cebu, where we took a further two nights to counter our jetlag before heading to to Ormoc by SuperCat boat on Monday morning. We drove the hour up the road to our base in Kananga in a minivan we hired with a group of other arriving volunteers and finally encountered the destruction. Everyone has seen the pictures on the news so I will instead relay the conversation I had with a Filipino lady who had travelled across the country to find insulin (diabetes is a major problem in a country whose major exports are sugar and white rice!) She told me that the coconut crop would take over ten years to recover, and that in Tacloban, on the opposite coast to Ormoc, not a single shop had reopened even four months after the storm. 

We arrived on base, set up our mosquito nets and inflatable mattresses on the floor of the laundry room, there are over 50 All Hands volunteers currently in Kananga hospital and space is at a premium! Despite that we felt at home within a couple of days at work. We both spent our first day painting the tin roof of the hospital in the blazing sun; living in a space we are also working on is a strange but rewarding experience and we made fantastic progress. 

Since then we have spent every day on external projects , loading up the jeepneys and travelling around local communities working on houses and schools. The projects vary massively. I (Robbie) have spent days sledging through concrete blocks to levels classrooms and allow schools to rebuild while Jenny has taken a serious interest in safety work, which is the process of strategising the safest and most efficient way of taking down damaged structures while preserving as many building materials as possible. The local children worship the volunteers and love to talk to us and wave as we drive past on our way to and from projects. We have spent our lunch hours playing  "123Beiber" with them. The game involves kicking flip flops, seemingly nothing to do with Mr. J Beiber whatsoever!

Sundays present a unique opportunity to get some WiFi, running water and dietary variety (two rice meals a day can be tiring) so many volunteers head to hotels and restaurants in Ormoc to contact home and rest up in anticipation of another week of sledgehammering, crowbarring and angle grinding! Aching joints are no real price to pay though now that we have made ourselves at home here and seeing AHV go to work is a truly inspiring experience. Please donate to the charity if you can, we really can vouch for the effectiveness of the work and the value of it to the communities. 

It's hard to say how often we'll be able to post but the work continues. One week down, 12 to go!