Sunrise reflections...

Here I sit on my penultimate morning in this country I have made my home in some form or other over the past three months, with mixed feelings about my looming departure. I am looking forward to heading home, but part of me longs to stay, to continue to share further in the slow process of rebuilding a shattered people, of making whatever small positive contribution I am able to...

I have formed lifelong bonds, both with those who I have tried to help, sharing in the ups and downs of their communities as I have done so, along with those who I have worked with, shedding sweat and tears for our efforts. I have been welcomed into homes, shared moments of laughter and fun with the always smiling, always beautiful children. And I have learned. I have learned the resiliance of a people, I have seen their adaptability and perserverance under extreme situations. I have learned what the face of heartbreak and fear looks like, heartbreak at loved ones lost, fear of the never knowing if another tsunami will happen. And I have learned what difference one person can make.

And here I ask that question: So have I made such a big difference? Part of me wants to say an unequivocal "yes", that I have had a significant positive impact during my time here, that I will be remembered for years to come for the part I played in helping to rebuild a small part of this beautiful island. But another part of me recognises that I am but one individual, and the shear size of the work required all but impossible to scale by one person alone.

However I have also come to realise that progress cannot always be measured in leaps and bounds, but is often made up of a series of small and almost insignificant advances here and there over a long period of time. A few temporary shelters erected, a sanitation block or two built, is not going to result in redemption from hardship for those who have lost everything. But multiply this by the hundreds... no, thousands of other individuals like myself who have also given of themselves, and maybe I can feel as though my small contribution is an essential part of something much larger, and far more significant.

Who knows? How do I measure the impact I have had just living in and being part of a small community for two months? How do I know which child I have laughed with, or helped win a volleyball or cricket match with, will take away a lasting impression that alters the way their life progresses?

Who knows?

So as I bid adieu to this island of Sri Lanka and head onto the next stage of my own life, I look forward to returning one day, renewing friendships, and hopefully seeing a coastal nation that is once again always smiling as it faces the joys that life has to offer in the face of occasional adversity.

...continued

"Nay na na na..."

So goes the song pumping out from the bar/restaurant behind where I lie on my sun lounge, toes burrowing into the soft sand as I gaze lazily across the turquoise blue bay. Yeah, life can be hard sometimes...

Being based on the south west coast - Sri Lanka's tourism central - for these last few weeks, I thought it would be positively rude of me if I didn't get down to one of the beach resort areas for a few days of r & r at least. And with bikini-clad girls to the left of me, bikini-clad girls to the right of me, and now a g-string clad girl emerging dripping wet from the sea in front of me... well, I figure a little time out won't be hurting anyone.

Besides, I figure after two and a half months I deserve it, if I do say so myself. So here I am in Unawatuna, just around from Galle in the south, a beautiful bay protected by a reef just off shore that I'll be diving on tomorrow.

"Waiter, another of those cocktails please, the one with all the fruity bits!"

...continued

The "Relief Worker for a Day" Tour

Ealier today saw the quintessential, "Oh honey, let's go hand out some goodies to the poor refugees so we can feel better about ourselves" group at the Buddhist temple where we're currently building a toilet block.

A group of 4 or 5 very German looking people, in a 3,000 rupee per day rental van (we're paying our head mason 800 rupees a day), handing out a few t-shirts to the kids from the families living in one of the temple halls. Oh, and they had their state-of-the-art digital video camera to film it all on too... of course.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for anyone and everyone to keep - or start - coming to Sri Lanka or any of the other affected countries as a tourist, thereby bringing more money into the economy and helping with the recovery that way. However, what I'm not into is those who feel a need to treat the groups of affected peoples as some sort of tourist attraction, where they come, hand out their $5 worth of local t-shirts or sweets, and then go back to their foriegn-owned $100+ hotel room and eat their $30 buffet lunch.

Don't kid yourself people. If you want to come for a nice relaxing holiday then please do so, enjoy yourself to your heart's content, and feel positive about the money you're putting into the local economy. But if you really do want to help - rather than capture some good video footage of you appearing to help - no matter how small the money or time you have, then talk to those who are doing the work and ensure that your contribution can be put to good use and not wasted for the sake of a couple of Kodak moments.

...continued

East v West, a non competitive comparison

So, how do either sides of the country compare, I hear you ask. Good question.

The east, as you would imagine, had far greater devastation over a much larger area, as it did get hit directly with the oncoming tsunami. Basically every part of the coast was hit, and depending on the height of the land sometimes for up to a kilometre inland. You've seen the photos, so you have some idea of what I mean.

When I first drove down from Colombo on the west coast, I was thinking to myself, so where's the damage I've been hearing about? Even my glimpses of the coast as the road veered that way every now and then revealed no damage that I could see. We even made it all the way to Wonder Bar in Bentota, about a third of the way down to Galle in the south, where we met Keith (and I created my hangover from hell), without any evidence of tsunami damage.

The enxt day we headed further south with Keith, to check out the current sanitation project. This was being built behind a buddhist temple, home to a number of Monks - including a cute little 8 year old, and a cricket playing teenager - along with the current temporay residence of around 20 families whose homes had been destroyed in the tsunami. But I still had not seen any evidence of tsunami damage.

But then we headed further south... and the road veered closer to the coast... and then a few damaged buildings, but nowhere near the scale of devastation as the east. Then we travelled further down and now the road passed right along the coastline. The damage was now apparant, though it was strange... some places showed a great deal of damage, while others just up the road showed none. It was like the flow of the water on this side of the island had not been consistent all the way up the coast.

Then we hit another part of the coast - a small town called Periyala, just north of a fairly major tourist town (where I'm sitting typing now) - and the devestation here was like on the east. Houses simply flattened, a few left standing with crushed walls and everything inside lost. Temporary housing and palm trees dotted the landscape. Small lakes could also be seen around the village, evidence of the two das of torrential rain that had fallen just recently. Mosquito borne diseases would be rampant in the coming weeks.

Another result of the heavy rains? Dead bodies had been found just a few days ago, bodies that had been buried in the first few days after the disaster, just a few feet below ground. The rain had now raised the already high watrer table up to the surface, bringing with it the bodies. There was an Australian nurse working out of a small school building in the town who was going around and doing what she could with the bodies that were "popping up". She said there were 16 in a building just across the road. I didn't walk over to check.

We had come here predominately to check out one of the toilet blocks built earlier, and as it happened a new body had been put inside the female block for the nurse to check. Fortunately, before I had known this, I had walked into the MALE side to check out the structure from within. I'm not really sure what my response would have been if the body had been put in that side. A body that had been decomposing in damp ground for three months. No thanks...

So, overall, far more widespread damage in the east, but still much to write home about (as I am) on the west. And the strange anomoly is, the east is getting far more help than the west. I drive through these damaged areas, surrounded by undamaged towns and 4 and 5 star hotels and restaurants, tourists doing their things as per any resort area, and yet the government and major NGOs are virtually non-existant in these areas as I have discovered. All the work that I am hearing about is being done by small NGOs and/or individuals, and as a result though the affected people are surrounded by a fully functioning economic environment, they find themselves without decent shelter, sanitation, food items, or livelihood items, and less likely of recieving these things.

Funny how these things work, huh?

...continued

Cheers to that!

After two months spent in a small, remote village on the east coast, I have now hit tourist central on the west coast south of Colombo. And the first result of this? My worst hangover in living memory! Ugh!!

I'm not sure if it was the fact that I had not been drunk in two months, or if it was due to the extreme heat I've experienced over that time, or a combination of both, but on the morning after my first evening in my first tourist bar I had seen in two months I was the mother of all hangovers. I guess that's what happens when you drink 17 beers!! Yes, 17... well, that's the number that were on my bill, and since my fellow drinker, an English guy named Keith, had 19 on his, I guess it was so.

Oh, plus a few Arak shots! Ugh!!

Okay, let's recap a little... I had arrived back in Colombo from Kallar, and headed to the offices of Impakt Aid. They then sent myself plus another English guy, Julian (who had just arrived from the UK, so a newbie), to meet Keith at a hotel/bar in a town called Bentota about 60km south of Colombo. We were to take a look at the project he was managing, with a view to take over the finishing of it, as well as move onto other locations with the same project. And the project?

When you've gotta go, you've gotta go...

Yep, toilets. Or, to put it in it's technical term, "sanitation".

Yeah, a little different from the shelter project I'd been working over on the east, but let's put a little perspective on it: If you have 50 families (so, roughly 200+ people) living in temporary shelters that have no facilities whatsover, and if they're VERY lucky maybe 4 or 6 public toilets of variable condition nearby, how important would it be then? Yeah, "sanitation" assumes slightly more importance when you put it in perspective.

Unsanitary conditions

Constructing the septic tank

A newly completed 4 toilet system

The design we're using was actually drawn up by a couple of engineers from California, and approved by the Sri Lankan environmental minister, which is something that the toilets being built by the government themselves have not been. It's actually a little scary casting an eye over some of the facilities that have eben built for those living in the various IDP camps, considering most of these people will be living here for 12 months and upwards...

...continued

So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu!

No, I'm not about to break out into song while running down the nearest mountain, however I am leaving Kallar... this afternoon at that! Yep, time has come to move onto another area where some more immediate help is required. The projects now taking place in Kallar are more of the long term kind, and there are a number of NGOs in place to implement them who are here for the long haul. I'm heading over to the west coast to help out with that small NGO I had mentioned in a previous post, Impakt Aid. They're still trying to get some land allocated by the government for some semi-permanent shelters for a group of people still living in a school, and building latrines amongst other projects. More details if at all interested on their website: www.impaktaid.com.

Parting, as they say, is such sweet sorrow, and I will leave some very good frinds behind as I depart. However in my almost two months here I have seen great changes, and hopefully have had a positive impact on both the people and the village. I will look forward to returning in the years to come to see how Kallar has progressed. It really has the potential to be a truly beautiful little village once more.

...continued

Kallar colour

Rightly or wrongly, even in a small village like Kallar, much of the colour surrounding us daily is via advertising, though there are also a couple of interesting murals and street graf... ;o)

...continued

Easter weekend Part 3: Back to Kallar

Well, all good things must come to an end, so Monday morning with a slight hangover and it was back on the road "home" (yeak, thinking of the Kallar YMCA as home?! Now that's scary!). This was a fairly nondescript ride back, apart from a slight detour to check out the IDP camp I had spied on the hillside on the ride down.

I passed through a small village to get to the camp, and then came out to a flat, rocky rise heading up to a few large boulders on the hilltop. I passed a temporary hospital, obviously set up by the resident NGO for the camp, and pulled up in the shade of the boulders. I climbed up some rough stairs on the largest boulder, as shown by some kids who were on top, and as I climbed up the IDP camp spread out before me on the other side of the rise.

Now THIS camp was exactly like the ones I had envisaged from home, and similar to the camp I had seen years before near the border of Rwanda in Tanzania. Rows upon rows of shiny tin-roofed shelters, curving around a central work/storage area. However unlike the camps you might imagine, or even the one I saw in Tanzania, there wasn't quite the feeling of desolation hanging over it. The rows seemed very neat, and there was even a children's play area. Maybe a b-grade English holiday camp would be a fairer comparison? ;o)

I headed down into the camp proper, and met up with one of the MSF workers helping to run the camp. The question I had foremost in my mind was where had these people come from, we must have been 4 or 5km from the ocean. But apparently they had come from the coast, and the area was only just now being cleaned and prepared for the building of permanent housing. So while it initially seemed a little less fortunate than the Kallar area, where they are at least living mostly on their own land, from what he was telling me they will start building their permanent housing from next week. At the moment in Kallar that's not likely to happen for a good month at the very least. Anyway, curiosity satisfied, and some new information garnered, and I was back on the road and home to Kallar.

And so ends my Easter weekend. I hope yours was a great one!

...continued

Easter weekend Part 2: Aragum Bay

So, Aragum Bay. After my 5 hour ride down, I was hanging out to see what all the hype was about. Sri Lanka's "newest party spot", one of the "top ten surf sites in the world"... these were just two of the descriptions I had read or heard to describe the place, so even with the damage from the tsunami I was expecting something a little special.

I rode over the recently opened new bridge - built by the Indian army over the past couple of months - and Aragum Bay appeared before me, a sweeping sandy bay curving away to white capped waves breaking on the distant point. From a distance it lived up to its promise, with palm trees dotted along the beach, and the inviting blue of the ocean. By this time I had got quite sunburnt from my ride (memo to self: wear plenty of sunscreen on your arms and face on your next bike ride) and was looking forward to diving into the cooling ocean.

I rode into the village along a road that was completely washed away in parts, pot-holed in others. To the left, along the seafront, the damage to the hotels and bungalows was very apparent. Some of the larger buildings had survived mostly intact, though there was obviously a great deal of cleaning up and repairing to be done. However much of the smaller constructions - bungalows, cafes and the like - had been completely washed away, just as with the housing in other areas.

I stayed with a guy called Steve, who ran a hotel called "Rocco's", who Justin, one of the former volunteers at Kallar, had met a month or so ago. While his rooms were not in any sort of condition to rent out, he offered me a free mattress in the open-air attic that he himself was camping in. After dropping off my gear, I went in search of food, and the restaurant that I just couldn't say no to? The one that had a big "air conditioned" sign of course! Ah, the simple pleasures of life...

So after a cheese and tomato sandwich (yes, I did say simple pleasures... plus it was actually past their usual lunch service hour) I then went to check out the beach.

Anyway, to cut a long story short about my Aragum Bay stay (which really is about me more than the Sri Lankan people!), I spent a lovely couple of days doing not much at all, meeting a few NGO workers over a cold beer or two, and got a bit more of a low down on some of the less than savoury government legislation being implemented that I had already heard bits and pieces of - such as any hotel with more than 35% damage could not be rebuilt due to the "buffer zone" laws being implemented, unless of course it was owned by a foreign national with money!

The new legislation being debated and implemented (yes, in Sri Lanka it happens at the same time, hence why the laws are always changing!) is to make it unlawful for anyone to live within 200m of the ocean. Or is that 100m? Or 300? No, I'm not trying to remember which it is, but going over the different distances that have been decided on at different times over the past 2 months. And no one still knows for sure which it will be. Oh, but this legislation does not apply if you are a foreign national with money to invest, and willing to pay 100% in tax. In that case the "buffer zone" legislation being put forward doesn't apply to you at all and you can build to your heart's content. Mighty handy for the major hotel chains, not so handy for the local fisherman...

The result of this in Aragum Bay was that the local owners of hotels that had been fully or substantially damaged had to lie and say that it was only 35% damaged, which in turn meant they could not apply for help from the bank to rebuild their businesses. Yes, such is the way governments work...

Summary of Aragum Bay: Will be a nice enough place once the hotels and restaurants are repaired, which will happen fairly quickly due to the tourist dollar. The beach itself is nice and clean, and curves around to a point with a reef where the best surfing is. However if comparing to a number of places in Thailand - and probably other Asian/island destinations - or even northern Queensland, is nothing terribly special. And it certainly isn't one of the "top ten surf sites in the world", though with the British surf association holding one of their rounds there in June it has some decent surf at the right time of year apparently.

...continued

Easter weekend Part 1: Go south young man!

So I did... for the Easter weekend. Yep, decided that while you guys were involved in all things eggy and chocolaty, I'd rent a motorbike and head down south for a few days to Aragum Bay. Yep, Davy boy on a motorbike! Watch out Sri Lanka! (Unfortunately, photo-wise you'll have to be waiting for the pictures - apart from the one above of me looking very cool on my super bike - as I was not able to borrow a digital camera for the trip. Anyway, use your imagination... ;o)

My reasons for heading down were two-fold:
1) I wanted to check out the areas south of Kallar, how badly they were affected, and how the relief work was progressing. It can get very insular living in this small village, and my knowledge of what's been happening outside of the immediate area has strictly been second hand.
2) I needed a bit of R'n'R. I've been in Sri Lanka now for almost two months, and in all honesty it's seemed a lot longer, oh yeah! And with a few frustrations getting to me a bit, I thought the break would do me good. Plus, it had been a while since I'd had a good ol' night out on the town!

Anyway, Friday morning and I'm all packed, hop onto my Suzuki super bike, all 250cc of her, and damn if that old classic tune doesn't come into my head... "Get your motor running.... Head out on the highway..."

Well, not sure about "highway", the best you can ever hope for in Sri Lanka is "paved road" though not sure if that would rhyme?? Anyway, after working out how to start the thing, I felt an old familiar feeling between my legs... so I rushed off to the bathroom before I left. Boom boom!

Okay, enough of the bad jokes I hear you say...

So anyway, I'm underway, "out on the highway", "looking for adventure", or at least "looking at" the dirty great bus bearing down on me in the middle of the road (as all good Sri Lankan bus drivers must drive, scattering those before them)...

Actually, speaking of Sri Lankan buses, I never knew that in Sri Lanka "bus" meant "mobile disco", did you? I mean, it must do, what with the bright throbbing fluro lights that any good Sri Lankan bus driver worth his salt has plastered around the inside cabin of his bus and often along the isles, pulsing to the beat of his extremely loud Sri Lankan pop music, which is a cross between Britney Spears on speed and the sound of nails scratching down a blackboard. And just like any good disco, this even happens if you board a bus at 5:00am in the morning after an excruciating long overnight train trip from Colombo. Party on Sri Lanka!

Anyway, back to my adventure at hand... and I'm actually feeling pretty good, cruising along, breeze blowing in my face, keeping me probably as cool as I've been since leaving Colombo and its air-conditioned restaurants and shopping centres. I'm finding it just slightly harder than usual to wave to every second kid I pass, shouting out the obligatory "Hello, how are you, what's your name?" as I ride by them, but that's probably a little understandable. I mean, up until yesterday afternoon I had never ridden a motorbike before, and I figured for a newbie I was doing okay, but I definitely wasn't going to take one of my hands of the handle bar and wave at the kids!

After a couple of hours riding, and a bit of a sore arse from the not so comfortable seat (just couldn't quite get comfortable wrapping my legs around a throbbing piece of machinery), I decided to turn off the main road and head towards the coast, just to check out the damage and work being done in this area.

So headed up along this narrow street, walled houses either side of me as is the style in Sri Lanka, bumping across the odd pot hole or two in the hard packed dirt road... then saw that I was approaching a group of people - men mostly - hanging out under a tree, not doing much else it seemed apart from staring at me by this time. As I slowly bumped past them, I saw to my left in a small clearing amongst houses an IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp, small tin roofed shacks with some Islamic relief organisation logo on them. I continued past the group, and came upon the affected area, starting about 70 metres or so from the ocean here - so a little closer than in Kallar, where the tsunami caused damage up to 200 and sometimes 300 metres from the coast. However, unlike Kallar, where there were many trees remaining and people have mostly moved back to their land, even if they're living in tents, shelters or the remains of their partly damaged houses, here there was no sign of life or habitation within this almost completely flattened and treeless strip of land.

Upon reaching a road running along the beach I pulled up and switched the engine off. The first thing I noticed was the silence, again a little different from Kallar at this time of day (early afternoon) when you would hear at least some sign of life. I could hear the waves breaking gently on the beach, along with a few birds here and there, but from what seemed to have been a fairly populated area judging by the density of the housing leading up to the affected area, the complete lack of life in this area near the beach was quite eerie. I guess if comparing to the Kallar area, the housing here did go right up to the beach, where as in Kallar there was always a strip of sandy land around 100m wide between the nearest houses and the ocean, plus at one end of Kallar village there is also a narrow lagoon separating the village from the beachfront and ocean. However, just as in Kallar, there was still a couple of houses only partly damaged standing right at the beachfront.

After my brief moment of contemplation, a small group of people - actually, one guy and a couple of kids on bicycles - arrived from the small group I'd passed. The usual "Hello... How are you? ...What's your name?" from the kids, and then the guy introduced himself, and offered to show me where he lived. This happened to be back at the IDP camp, or to be more accurate as I was to discover, at another small camp set behind this first one.

I parked my bike near the group of men under the tree, and followed the guy towards his "home". My first sight of the shelters was of a long corrugated tin roof and long dark tarp wall, a "terrace house" type construction with each family living side by side sharing walls. Women cooking over a small fire out the front of their tiny shelter, small kids playing in the dirt... Ah yes, the dirt... If I remember nothing else from this country, it will be the dirt. Dirt ground, dirt floors everywhere. Even in the "nice" houses, dirt is just constantly tracked in to form this omnipresent covering over every floor. And in the camp, the dirt ground outside flows unbroken into the dirt floor inside the shelter.

The guy showed me the inside of his "home", and it was as sparse as you would imagine, a few reed mats for sleeping rolled up in the corner, clothes hanging from wire hung along the wall. He explained to me as best he could in his very broken English (which is substantially better than my minimal Tamil) that they were not getting much in the way of help from the government or the local NGO, now that they had their shelters. It seemed that the move into the next phase - permanent housing - was a long way off for these folks. I gave my promise to him to try to do as much as I could for them (though what that may be I don't know at the moment), and then headed back to the main road.

Another couple of hours of the normal Sri Lankan urban scenery - mostly fairly rundown retail businesses along the main road, the odd school, factory, featureless government building, mosque and church - and then finally hit some open country side: flat, featureless plains with various low lying crops growing. Soon after, the road finally began to run along the coast - it runs a kilometre or so inland for most of its journey down the east coast - and I passed a cemetery that had been shown no mercy by the tsunami. Headstones all over the place, some of the smaller ones had obviously been tossed around by the force of the waves, the larger ones tilted this way and that with great swathes of land washed out from under them. I shuddered to think of what else had been washed out of the ground and by now hopefully removed or reburied.

Shortly after this, I arrived in a place that was even more eerie... From a fairly bleak, rough and ready road and surroundings, I suddenly found myself cruising along this relatively smooth, wide road amongst huge, overhanging trees. It was like a large boulevard or similar. Amongst the trees, usually set back from the road a bit - and this was probably the most striking difference with the Sri Lanka I had so far experienced, where everything is built right up to the road edge - were houses, and a couple of temples and stores. It was a small, and quite lovely, seaside village... however it appeared to be absolutely empty. I slowly cruised to a standstill, and switched the engine off. The only sound was the ocean just off to my left. I looked around for any sign of life, even a dog. There was some obvious damage here and there - actually quite substantial in a couple of places - however certainly not enough that you wouldn't expect people to still be living there. But no... no sound, no sign of anyone or anything moving. It reminded me of some horror movie, where you've awoken in a village and all the people have disappeared... So as they say, I got on my bike and rode!

I rode over a bridge out of the village, and finally saw my first person for a while. That made it seem even stranger that no one was living there, if just up the road and over a bridge people were living. A strange experience indeed.

Further on I rode through an area of bush, and then quite suddenly came across the start of a substantial tent IDP camp, stretching into the trees on both side of the road. This must have gone on for about a kilometre, and though quite depressing in a way to see so many still living in tents, at least the trees offered shade and protection from the wind. I was to see a lot bleaker up the road.

I passed a tent camp of the Finnish Red Cross, obviously the NGO for the area. At least these guys were actually living in tents rather than some of the more salubrious hotels that some other NGOs had taken up residence in other parts of the country. Their location near the IDP camp, and the delivery of building materials within the camp as I passed, seemed to indicate that as far as circumstances allowed, the needs of the people here were being addressed. I know it may seem impossible that anyone could make a judgement of that kind while simply riding through a place, but it was certainly the impression I got drawing on my limited experiences. As I said earlier, my two months here has seemed FAR longer, and I feel like I have experienced and learnt far more during this period than at any other time in my life.

...continued

So should I be pissed off...?

...or accept it as simply one of those things that happens in a disaster relief situation, even though it really could - and should - have been avoided? Anyway, to fill you in...

Yesterday we had a visit to the YMCA from a representative of the government department TAP (Temporary Accommodation Program, I think...), set up by the Sri Lankan Prime Minister himself to oversee the numerous NGOs and their temporary shelter construction projects. And it seems he was none too impressed with the shelters being built by ADT, the small NGO I've been assisting, and so "discussions" are being had between ADT and TAP as to how to proceed - whether to continue with the current shelters with some amendments of some type, or else to scrap all that's been done so far and start from scratch!

Yep, from scratch, one of the possibilities mooted by the TAP representative, so much do ADT shelters not meet their brief and minimum requirements. So, that would be a whole lot of work done by myself, and a few other volunteers that have worked on the project, that would have all been for nowt.

Avoidable? Yep, I believe that indeed it was. For starters, the designs did not meet international relief standards in terms of size. I found this out a couple of weeks ago, when we had a brief discussion with some guys from GTZ, who are a German government organisation assisting the Sri Lankan government with the coordination of shelter construction. These specifications are available for anyone doing the most cursory search into the subject, and I would have thought essential for any NGO working in the area, even a new, small one. Now, that to me is a very fundamental - and very obvious - stuff-up that somebody should get their balls strung up for.

Secondly, the design and materials do not seem to me very unsuitable for the climate we're in. They have a tin roof, and a windowless dark coloured tarp wrapped around a metal frame, with only a small door opening. Hardly something that you would think of designing for a hot, humid country, no? Even allowing for a tin roof (due to costs, perhaps), and some form of soft wrap around wall (I have seen MSF shelters that have windows, a wider door and white walls), the addition of some form of simple roof insulation - low cost styrofoam for example, as someone from another NGO mentioned to me at some stage - would keep out the worst of the heat. Anyway, just some very fundamental design flaws it would seem.

Then there are also the concerns I've had since first assisting with the shelters with regards to the three public spaces allocated for the "camps", which in all honesty are as close or even closer to the ocean than the actual properties of the families who would supposedly be moving there. So, if you're a family to afraid to move back to your own property because of the vicinity to the ocean, are you going to want top move to an IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp closer to the ocean. Well, duh!

The worst thing about all this is, of course, that we are three months down the track since the tsunami hit, and people are still living in tents, and in some cases (though not locally fortunately) sheltering in schools and churches. And in a month or so we have the start of the wet season...

The shelters ADT are constructing...





...are quite similar in design to those from MSF...



...which in some ways are not quite as good as those from LEADS and EHED...





...but then they don't take nearly so long to construct, which means construction of permanent housing can begin sooner. In theory...

...continued