The Final Countdown

It's almost impossible to believe, but we are now only one week away from leaving AHV Project Leyte. Having completed fourteen weeks of volunteering we will be spending our final days with Jenny attending numerous CRS meetings and planning for the future of the decon programme in Tacloban while I have been asked to help with the training of new team leaders to take the work forward after a major exodus of long term volunteers which began last night. The culture of AHV dictates that groups of volunteers are constantly changing as people come and go. What this means is that very often, just as a group has settled and the key players both in the field and the social group have been established, many of them appear to leave all at once. What you end up with is a cycle of peaks and troughs as a very strong group who have experience in the field and a tight social circle leave and newer long term volunteers and big characters step in to fill those roles. We have witnessed two or three of these cycles, and now it is our turn to be part of the outgoing 'old guard'. Work has continued at a furious pace since my last post, and this week has seen an astonishing 1000 man hours put in on deconstruction sites across Tacloban. 

My current job site is the remains of a Barangay Hall, used for council meeting and community events before Yolanda. The storm surge accounted for the vast majority of the structure and left only the floor of the second story, which fell and, incredibly, remained intact while the rest of the building was swept away.

We have been working on the site for one week and, after days of sledgehammering, angle grinding and shovelling, have nearly removed the structure. 

We hope to have the site completed by midweek next week, which will allow me to spend my last few days helping with Team Leader training while also getting a good range of jobs in before reluctantly hanging up my sledgehammer for the foreseeable future.

JENNY SECTION:
As for me, I hung up my sledgehammer and work boots two weeks ago now.  I overdid the physical work; considering my standard fitness level at home, I do not know why I expected myself to be able to manage three and a half months of manual labour! Luckily I have been given the opportunity to act as Field Coordinator while the current one returns to England for a few weeks.  This job is exactly the kind of role I would like to have on a more permanent basis (and preferably for a wage!)  The last week has been one of the most complex of the trip for me - I no longer have to do any of the labour but I have to coordinate it for up to 35 volunteers! I share the role with Tonja, a Slovenian who I actually know from my previous AHV project in Cagayan de Oro.  The basic daily role involves finding work for the deconstruction sites, visiting families and hearing their stories and seeing their properties to work out how we can help.  The jobs are then put in a queue and we have to organise a daily schedule based on the number of volunteers each day, the team leaders available and the skill sets each one has.  Then one of us explains the work in the daily meeting and the logistics of each day, including transport and communication.  This alone can be frantic enough, jobs often become much longer or shorter depending on the beneficiaries' wishes.  Sometimes jobs have to be put on hold because a pig has been slaughtered on the column they were about to sledge, in our honour, of course.  (Little anecdote from yesterday.)

I am also the CRS liaison, which means that I have weekly meetings and daily communication with their engineers who, after detailed assessments of all the properties in 17 barangays along the coast, give materials and funds to rebuild homes.  Their beneficiaries must reach certain requirements before funding can be granted and one of those is clearing their own properties. This is where we come in.  With the information that I gather from CRS, we create a timeline of all the jobs and the order in which they will be receiving funding and create our schedule around those deadlines.

An example of our job board, Jenny's daily nemesis.

However there are other much bigger topics that fall onto our shoulders too.  Last monday we hoped to start a huge clearing site.  45 people lived there before the typhoon and it is one of CRS' biggest priorities.  They hope to give 20 people funding to rebuild on that land in the next 2 weeks.  However, on the Sunday, we found out that a body had been found on the site two weeks ago.  Tonja and I agreed to postpone work and go to reassess the site.  We found the landlord's family desperate for work to start and seemingly unaffected by the discovery of a body on their land. However as we were walking away from the site, the fire service arrived. They were there collecting the remains on a person found the day before.  Despite the site being high priority, it was clear that we needed to have a better protocol for body discovery. The following day Tonja and I went to visit the Fire Service Cadaver Retrieval Task Force.  Their captain is a lovely young guy called Anthony.  He was more than willing to communicate with us about anything that is reported to them in the barangays we are working in. We had the entire system explained to us: the fire service are contacted if anyone believes they have found human remains, Anthony's team are on permanent standby and are dispatched immediately. From there the Scene of the Crime Operatives and National Bureau of Investigation identify the type of remains and the person's identity and then the body can be returned to the family. As we went to leave his office, Anthony showed us a series of white boards on which they had documented the last 6 months. This very brave man and his team have collected over 2685 bodies across the city.

The next big topic has been the discovery of materials on site that are suspected to contains Asbestos.  This is a problem that in my eyes cannot be taken too seriously.  

This level of Personal Protective Equipment will not suffice!

With no money for the required equipment I have no intention of allowing volunteers to continue to work on a site until the material has been tested and the suspicion has been disproved.  Of course this is an unpopular decision with the beneficiaries who do not understand the danger of the product and therefore why we have abandoned work on their property (not, of course, for lack of trying to explain).

Finally, I have also been invited to be involved in some more positive changes within the organisation. Robbie and I are both involved in formalising the training for Team Leaders, and one of my biggest jobs at the moment is ensuring we train enough volunteers into Team Leaders before a large group of 'long-termers' leave.  I have also been asked to be involved in looking at new programmes for the volunteers in future months.  Today I went to look at a permanent housing development that we may be able to assist in over the next 6 weeks, building 20 concrete homes.  Hopefully next week I will be able to go to a Shelter Cluster meeting where all the organisations in Tacloban involved in shelter programmes meet to discuss progress.  I could not be happier in this role and it has only reaffirmed what I knew all along: this industry is definitely for me. Saving the world, one meeting at a time!

We have also been lucky enough to be in Tacloban to commemorate the passing of six months since the typhoon. On May 8th a local Barangay invited AHV to a commemorative ceremony which consisted of a series of speeches and presentations from Barangay officials and members of the AHV team. We then handed over balloons in the AHV blue and white colours to members of the community and watched as they were released in memory of those killed by the storm.

This was followed by a music concert in the astrodome, initially used as an evacuation centre after the storm, but now empty again and being used for community events such as the screening of Pacquiao fights and concerts.  It is incredibly important to AHV to be active in the community outside of simply putting in the hours on the worksite and the organisation is always willing to change the work schedule to enable us to engage with local events. The six month landmark was also noted by the Telegraph, and if you look very closely, you may spot me doing a little bit of work and a lot of messing around in the background of this video. We were interviewed for the piece, but apparently didn't say anything interesting enough to make the cut! 

Another community / organisation event took place on Sunday as our friends from International Disaster Volunteers joined forces with local business owners to host a football tournament at the Tacloban grandstand. Twenty AHV volunteers represented AHVFC and we played from 7.30am until well past midday in a round robin competition with teams made up of a combination of locals and volunteers from across the globe.

Despite giving a good account of ourselves, it was no surprise that the winning side was the one with the fewest volunteers and the most locals. We were quick, as many European teams may well be at this year's world cup, to blame everything from the pitch and the temperature to tired limbs at the end of the working week. I'll leave the real reason for the reader to decide.

Finally I need to make a confession. We are reminded with relative frequency that it is highly recommended that we do not help individual people or animals outside the remit of the organisation for a variety of reasons, all of which we both agree with. Those reasons, briefly, are that to give money, food or materials to any one person can quickly create a culture of expectation. On more than one occasion we have ended up with hoardes of excited children expecting us to buy them food or drinks, and trying to help us work. Not only can we never satisfy all their wants and needs, but to have them around us at work is a major hazard to both the children and the volunteers. The same applies to all potential beneficiaries, human or animal. As a result, AHV has adopted a blanket policy whereby no volunteer, while representing the organisation, may give out money or materials to individual beneficiaries. The staff also highly recommend that we do not take that course of action outside of base or work, but acknowledge that they cannot successfully police that policy. However:

We have found ourselves in a situation whereby we have been forced to break one of the rules of living on an AHV base. On Monday evening last week a volunteer arrived on base having found this kitten abandoned on a pile of rubbish. We have taken her in and kept her alive by feeding her on our dinner scraps. She is now infinitely healthier and happier than the scrawny, crying ball of fluff that arrived 12 days ago. Having a project pet is discussed regularly and dismissed as being bad for both the animal and the volunteers. With no one person taking direct responsibility and the animal's life hopefully outlasting the project, the long term future for a project animal is always bleak. As such, the intention is to find her a long term home as quickly as possible but, in the meantime, she has become a big part of our lives on base.

All that remains for us now is a trip to the beach (tomorrow), 6 days of work and then the dreaded leaving speeches. Last night was a particularly emotional one as we said goodbye to two of our longest serving volunteers, next week we will be part of a six person exodus. The time has flown but we are leaving on a high. I will most likely be wrapping up this blog with the next post, so watch this space for the big finale!