The Cyclone Shelter Report

Hey Hey hey – were alive and well, and returned from the cyclone shelter. Quick background: occaisonally, there’s a project that’s far enough away (in time, if not space) that it justifies sending a group of volunteers to live on site for a time, to save on the daily commute. That’s what we call a “safari.” For us, it meant spending 6 days in the town of “Bokantola” (or something like that), which was a whopping 10 kilometers away.

Of course, 10 km in Bangladesh required an hour and multiple modes of transportation to cover. The primary issue was Cyclone Sidr’s demolition of a key bridge going from Tafalbari across a river to the road that continued to Bokantola; that previously steel bridge had been replaced by a rickety bamboo contraption. For foot traffic, its not a huge deal as you can scoot across pretty quickly – however, we ended up hauling two trolley’s worth of stuff across, along with motorcycles, van-du’s, and the regular foot traffic – a distinctly precarious exercise.

Actually, let me step back, to the beginning. The safari builds are for playgrounds: Hands On is working with Save the Children (UK) to install playgrounds in 5 communities around the Sharankola area (in which our base town Rayenda is situated). Actually, by now, the 5th and final playground should be done – a big relief for everyone, no doubt! Anyway – at a high level, the playgrounds are a two step process to build: a pre-fab stage at the base in Rayenda, followed by transportation of the material to the playground site and installation.

Pre-fab is a long and arduous process. It consists of cutting and cleaning Bangladeshi lumber, and drilling holes in the right spots so that it can be bolted together quickly on the site. Now, when you think of lumber, you’re probably thinking of nice clean, straight boards – the kind you build a deck out of and then stain. Bangla-lumber is a different beast entirely. To begin with its cut from fresh wood – and when I say “fresh,” I mean like felled that morning, such that the wood is oozing sap, and when you drill it, water/sap squirts out around the bit – crazy. Secondly, bangla lumber is cut to get the most board feet from the tree – no matter what. The result is that no single board is straight. At all. See the picture to the right – that’s a 4×4 piece (carried by Nate and Tim – nice Longi’s dudes) that’s shaped like a crescent moon (note: its supposed to be straight). So – pre-fab consists of cutting the lumber to size, throwing away a third of it that’s cracked, too full of knots, or mostly bark, then planing and edging it, then laying it out roughly in shape and drilling. The planing and edging is to reduce the number of slivers and cuts that kids receive, and make it a lot easier to paint. Planing is choke point in our critical path – we had two Black and Decker weekend-warrior electric planers, and with the electricity being spotty, getting the massive amounts of lumber planed quickly enough to ship out to a build was a major effort. One of the planers eventually ate a shirt (Anu survived unscathed) and died – fortunately, 4 of the playgrounds were done by that point.

So – pre-fab takes 3 or 4 days per playground, after which you’ve got a pile of lumber, perhaps the size of a small pickup truck, like a Mazda B2200. Now, it needs to go from the base in Rayenda, to the playground: not a simple process. Consider: in Rayenda, a town of 50,000 people, there’s one pickup truck, owned by an NGO. There zero cars, a few motor bikes, and a lot of bicycle vans. Fortunately, there’s also something called a “trolley” – a sheet metal truck bed, pulled by a 2 wheeled tiller – i.e.: a farm implement with the digging blades detached, and rigged up to pull the bed. On our big day, the first trolley made it 20 meters down the path from our house to the road before a belt snapped – yay!

Remember the Tafalbari bamboo bridge-of-death? A trolley will not make it over that, so once we get there, all of the wood comes off, and is carried by hand over the river. Quick note: all of our own safari supplies need to be transported too (bedding, clothes, etc.), and tragedy was narrowly averted when a jar of our treasured “mobile” biscuits (shortbread cookies) fell off the bridge into the river, to be quickly retrieved by the local kids. Anyway – once over the bridge, the wood is reloaded onto our next bizarre means of conveyance – a “taligari.” A Taligari is a set of bamboo poles lashed together, with diagonal uprights providing sides, to create a rickety bamboo truck bed. This contraption is strapped to a single truck axle with two wheels in the center, and two Bangladeshi men at the front – who provide the motive force by freaking pulling and pushing this thing along the road. Anyway – several hours, several trolleys, vans, river crossings, and taligari’s, and were there!

“There” is a cyclone shelter where we’ll spend the next 5 or 6 days. A cyclone shelter is essentially an elevated concrete bunker: the bunker elements keep people safe from winds, lightning and flying debris, the elevation protects inhabitants from floodwaters. These giant structures dot the countryside, and also serve as classrooms and community centres when not protecting people in storms. Our cyclone shelter overlooked the empty acre mud plain where we’d be building, and was adjacent to our school and a number of good swimming ponds. The shady area under the shelter also provided a place to do a lot of painting work outside of the sun – a rare treat.

For living, the shelter was perfect. If you can’t tell from the photos, its a big l-shaped structure, providing us with more living space than our home base, and separate sleeping and eating areas. Most importantly, it provided a natural insulating layer between us and the locals. One thing you’ll notice here as soon as you arrive is “the fishbowl” – i.e.: big groups of people staring at you all of the time. If, like on some of the other playground builds, you’re staying in a ground floor room, you’ll find it really hard to get privacy and a few minutes away from the locals – apparently at some locations, you could wake up in the middle of the night and have people peering in your windows at any hour – disconcerting and annoying if harmless. The cyclone shelter, with a single entry point (a big staircase) took care of that issue easily – the locals were informed by the village elders that the staircase was off limits, and that was that. In addition to our eating and sleeping area, we also had the rooftop – which was a big open patio, perfect for chilling out, or sleeping out under the stars as Dan and Rajib did. The inside sleeping area was great too – big windows provided ventilation, and Connie and Allan rigged up a crazy rope system to hang our mosquito nets from – and sweaty laundry. [Pictures, from top to bottom: Tall Cool Dan, Connie brushing her teeth with 30 friends at the bottom of the stairs, the rooftop chillout zone after work, our sleeping area, goats enjoying the shade under the shelter]

When we left for the cyclone shelter, Allan (pictured in the hat) was feeling ill, and unfortunately his condition worsened over the first night, leaving him incapacitated and stuck in bed. John (pictured in the tire) followed suit the next day, taking our team strength down from 7 to 5. Sadly for both of them, the nature of their illness was of the gastrointestinal type – with toilet consequences I’m sure you can imagine. Which brings up our bathroom arrangements, which were… interesting. The first set of toilets had been damaged in a storm and backed up, and interestingly had later been claimed by the goats as their own – seeing a toilet stall full of goat pellets was pretty damn funny. There was another set of concrete squat toilets adjacent to the school which had the mysterious squat toilet feature of being essentially unflushable – not a great option for John, Allan, or any of us really. Which left the Tarp Toilets: two newly installed concrete squat toilets walled with bamboo poles holding up tarps to about shoulder height. They flushed well and were extraordinarily well ventilated, but left something to be desired in the privacy department. Oddly enough, the group consistently used the orange tarp toilet – the blue one just got no love – was it slightly smaller? Did the sun through the orange tarp create a cheerier squat ambiance? Connie maintains that the blue tarp’s proximity to the goat’s toilets made it less desireable. Who knows!

The tarp toilets were complemented with the bathing ponds. In rural Bangladesh, showers are rare but every home has a bathing pond close by. Given that the water table is at most two or three meters down anywhere in the country, building your bathing pond is a mater of just digging it as big as you want it. Once dug, you’ve got a pond that stays (relatively) fresh via ground water and rain, and can be used for bathing, dishwashing, laundry and so on. If a pond starts developing green algae, that’s a warning sign for the family that its getting over used. If the algae goes brown, that means its dangerous – polluted from overuse, or latrine contamination (shudder). Given that the community was conservative and Islamic, there were separate ponds for the men and the women. The women’s pond was maybe 150 meters away – over a cute bridge and down a trail to the school’s headmaster’s house. The ladies that lived there kept onlookers away, though Connie, Kirsty, Emma, and Valla were still obligated to bathe fully clothed. The Gentlemen’s Club tried a number of ponds around the area. The first (across the street) was shallow – 3 or 4 feet deep – and creepily warm (not being deep enough to stay cool in the sun), as well as being difficult to get out of without getting really muddy. The second, adjacent to the mosque, was heavily used and a little bit scummy. The one that we ended up settling on for regular use was actually the closest, the biggest, and the deepest – and had a good ramp for entry and egress.

Alright – to be continued! The amount of stuff that should be written out is just ridiculous.