05.51

There is a constant stream of short-stay volunteers coming and going. Their buses leave very early in the morning and they generally start packing up around 5.15. We don’t need to get up until 7 but because they are awake from 5.15, so are we. We don’t much like them.

Sunday was the hardest day so far, as we had been promised it would be, although I don’t think it’s because we were too tired. We ended up trying to dig around a foot and a half of tsunami detritus from someone’s lot in the direct sun. It was uninspiring work, because it was an empty lot and it was very slow and very difficult and we weren’t really sure how deep we needed to dig. We weren’t experienced enough to figure out how much water and how many breaks we needed and we all got headaches. In the end, it was decided there was too much for human labour to efficiently do and a digger was required. We were pleased to be transferred to a different job.

Yesterday was completely different. We were inside a house scooping mud and sludge and slop from the space under the floor. It was by far the dirtiest smelliest task we’ve done so far but, again, I really enjoyed myself. I spend so much time staring at a screen or in the lab pipetting that the opportunity to stretch my body instead of my brain is valuable. My new slim(ish)-line self is quite capable of digging for 8 hours without complaining, and that feels good too.

But yesterday was also the most emotional day we’ve had. The home owners were on site and. As is quite common, they show their gratitude with food. They supplied all the iced tea we could drink, a lavish lunch and ice cream for the afternoon break. In the even they sent sushi to our accommodation. During a break we were chatting and discovered the house was the woman’s sisters and she had died in the tsunami. The building (which was modern and large and must have been beautiful before) was one of only a few still standing in an area of utter devastation. 100 meters down the road two fire engines were sitting were they had been tumbled in amongst what has become the area dump. The house was a single story building with a high ceiling entrance, the water make was 2.5 meters up the wall of the hallway, in the rest of the building there had been nowhere to escape to. We found child’s toys in the mud. We don’t know whether they belonged to the family or had been swept in with the mud but the only thing to do was put the feelings they evoked in a tightly sealed box o deal with later and keep digging.