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 most common questions that people have been asking Robbie and me are about the living conditions we're going to and the type of work we'll be doing. More often than not my responses are met with a shocked face and a 'rather you than me' comment! Thankfully I am pretty prepared, having previously spent a month with All Hands Volunteers in the Philippines in 2012.  I can explain just how basic it will be and exactly why it will be worth every moment of cold bucket showers, dorms of snorers and hours of shoveling through mud and debris.

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.