I’m sitting here in Kuala Lumpur on a comfy couch in front of a giant TV showing Olympics results while surfing on a remarkably quick internet connection with a belly full of Mexican food. It’s a far cry from the last three plus months I’ve spent in rural Sumatra hauling rubble, throwing rocks, knocking down walls, building houses and being generally dirty and sweaty working with Hands On Disaster Response but I think I could get used to it. While I think I’m ready to move on, I really had a great time volunteering in Sumatra and will miss it a lot.
Here’s a bit of a summary of my time there:
The Work
The first couple of months were filled with rubble removal, rain or shine. It was tough but getting behind a shovel and wheelbarrow again was an amazing feeling. The salvage part of the work wasn’t quite as inspiring but separating river rock and bricks from crumbling mortar and saving tin and wood from the roof was important to be able to give people some materials to start with to rebuild their homes. Leaving people with an empty concrete foundation and a pile of rocks and/or bricks was kind of a bittersweet feeling but seeing them use that space and materials to build shelters was very cool.
I had a few attempts at joining deconstruction teams to bring houses safely to the ground but it wasn’t my thing. There is far too much pointing at things and thinking involved for me. Plus being responsible to bring down a giant structure scared the crap out of me, to be completely honest. But we had a bunch of people who stepped up to lead the decon teams and pulling down unsafe buildings as a team was always an exhilarating experience.
This past month has seen us building temporary shelters with a really awesome design. Wooden frames are built, chain link fence is wrapped around the outside and thin layer of concrete is put on top to create the look of a concrete house with more flexibility and less weight to fall on people if there’s another earthquake. I love the design and I love working with concrete so it was great to be a part of this process. I also got to work on prefabricating the pieces for the wooden frame which meant fun with circular saws. I feel like a learned a lot of handy new skills beyond just being a wheelbarrowing monkey (although I do love wheelbarrowing) and these are things I hope to build on when I head to Haiti.
The People
I loved the locals I came into contact with during my time on the project. Our translator Rena is always smiling and giggling, our driver Hamdan is so quick to jump in and help out with anything, and Rose the cook busted out meals and washed laundry in record time. A bunch of Indonesians came through the project as volunteers and it was great to meet them all, especially Redha, our first and most frequent volunteer who helped whenever he could on his breaks from university. Arman was a great addition later in the project and he taught me the way of the concrete wall and it was just really inspiring for me to see this older guy with a family to show up for work each day. The ice cream men on motorbikes were two of my favourite people each afternoon and Welly the fruit shake master was a lifesaver next door with some refreshing fruity creations after a long day at work.
I have made a lot of friends through Hands On with my time with them in Bangladesh and Haiti and it was great to see a lot of them in Indonesia. There seem to be a bunch of us who follow the organisation around and these people have become a sort of family on the road for me and knowing I can count on seeing them each time I head to a new project certainly makes my choice to go a lot easier. I made a bunch of new friends on this project as well and I’m convinced that HODR attracts people with a certain level of craziness that means I will always have people around who I have something in common with.
The Culture
The community in Sungai Geringging is rural and religious and there were a few issues with us descending on them to help out. Drinking beer in town was outlawed fairly early on. Boys and girls had to sleep in separate places which meant the construction of the ‘man tent’ outside and a girls-only sweet deal on the inside. A group of volunteers unwittingly caused a near-project-ending incident by walking down to a river late at night in boy/girl company. Old guys apparently were against us from the start, no matter how good the work we did was. Signs were erected saying ‘Volunteering, yes! Christianity, no!’ and the powers that be were paranoid that we were there to convert them. The work ‘Christmas’ was banned over the holidays. And so on, and so on.
Yay to culture! Boo to having to tip toe around it and having it affect our ability to do work there. It was probably inevitable that we would screw up from time to time. Things have always worked out in the end, but there have been some stressful moments in between. On the other hand, learning about the culture in rural Sumatra on such an intimate level was pretty fascinating and something I’m grateful to have experienced, even though it frustrated non-religious me at times.
While my time with HODR in Sumatra is over I don’t have much time to relax with a flight into Port-au-Prince, Haiti on March 15th. Between now and then the plan is to hang out with some volunteering friends in Malaysia before shipping off to the chilly UK to spend a couple of weeks visiting friends and family in London and Scotland. My ankle is still sort of screwed from when I hurt it a few weeks ago, my clothes are all gross, the cuts on my hands are still unhealed, my websites are neglected, and my bank account is hurting from expensive plane tickets but Haiti is where I want to be and, while two and a bit weeks between HODR projects could be a bit of a killer for my body and business, I can’t wait for the challenge.
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