MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2007:

An early start

The alarm goes off at 4.00 am, and we finish our rather disorganised packing. Mar, our driver, arrives at 4.45, we load up and at 5.02 we are on the road south towards Teunom. The roads are wonderfully empty this early in the morning, and we make really good time for the first hour – then, suddenly, there is no more tarmac and it’s bumpy, bumpy, bumpy and our speed goes down from 50 mph to about 10 mph.

After a couple of hours we reach a river where there is no bridge. We stand and wait for a bit – we had been told there was a ferry – but there is none in sight.Eventually Mar honks the horn a few times, and what we thought was part of a tiny dock the other side of the river, starts slowly moving towards us. It is the most basic ferry I’ve ever seen – just a wooden cube really, with one outboard motor. Mar only just manages to drive the jeep on to the cube without tumbling into the water – Hags and I had wisely decided we were travelling as foot passengers!

Shaking and jolting

We stop and have a quick kopi susu (coffee with condensed milk) and a couple of “Snow Pies” (small chocolate cakes with white pretend cream inside) in front of a tiny shack the other side of the river – it is all very calm and lovely, but we realise we need to press on if we are ever to reach our destination of Teunom.

We drive at varying speeds and in varying shades of discomfort for a total of 7 hours through beautiful country – we pass long, white beaches, we climb lush mountainsides and drive along the sides of brilliant green paddy fields. The bumpy bits are quite incredibly uncomfortable – they shake your spine and jolt your innards. And then suddenly you are driving on perfect tarmac, and you get really excited and think the journey will now be smooth - but sadly the tarmac patches are never very long and you are back on bumps - I had blithely thought that I would be able to write up my diary and get some work done during this time, but it simply was not possible.

The damage done by the tsunami in this area, near the coast was tremendous – a large forest area was destroyed, you can see from the mountains near the beaches how high the wave went (about 40 or 50 foot high in some places) and virtually every house or building has been built post-tsunami – meaning that the tsunami destroyed every building - thousands and thousands of them.

It’s actually only 117 miles from Banda Aceh to Teunom, and it took us 7 hours virtually to the minute, so we were travelling at an average of less than 17 miles an hour. We are very glad to eventually arrive at the Ides Charity house in the tiny village of Tanoh Manyang, just outside Teunom.

The housing project

Haggis and I first met our hosts, Ronald and Ellen, who work for Ides (a small American charity) when we came to Aceh in April last year. Part of our brief then, as well as running as many shows, workshops and games as we could for Children’s World International, was a separate little job for Michael Eavis of the Glastonbury Festival. Michael had a friend who sadly died in the tsunami In Thailand on Boxing Day 2004, and Michael wanted to make a major donation to post-tsunami housing in his memory, and put the Sunday-only £100,000 ticket money aside for this purpose. Because his friend Piers had died in Thailand, Michael had originally intended that the Festival houses to be built in Thailand, but he hadn't found the right way to do this yet. I had just returned from a Children’s World International Tour of Thailand in January 06, and told Michael that really Thailand had almost completely recovered and didn’t need money for rehousing at this stage. I encouraged Michael to give the money to Sri Lanka, which I had also recently visited and which I knew still needed housing urgently, but he was unwilling to do that because of all the Tamil troubles. I told Michael that in April 2006, Haggis and `I were off to Aceh, which had received the brunt of the tsunami, and asked him if he would like us to look at the housing situation for him there, and advise him on what NGO might be the best, fastest, and cheapest and most flexible and honest agency to work with. After a lot of hunting around in Aceh in April, we came up with Ides, a small flexible charity who are building very nice temporary housing (which is so well made, it could actually last 10-15 years with luck) in the Teunom area, about 120 miles south west of Banda Aceh, an area that was very badly hit by the tsunami. So far £17,620 has been spent and 28.3 houses (at an average cost of 11 million rupiahs, about £670 each!) erected with Glastonbury Festival cash, and I am really looking forward to seeing them.

Fickle monkey

We arrived at Ronald and Ellen’s house eventually just after noon – seven hours after we left Green Paradise. Mar heads off to stay with family in Calang, and will come back to collect us at 5.00 am on Wednesday morning. It’s great to see Ronald and Ellen again and their monkey (who used to love me, but has now switched his allegiance to Haggis – boo hoo!) It is even hotter here than in Banda, if such a thing is possible! We have lunch with their volunteer friends and then Ronald and I go and look at some of the Festival houses that have been built in the nearby village of Alue Ambang.

Festival houses

The wooden 6m x 6m houses, with steel roofs, all look great, and are all decorated in different ways with different coloured window and door frames - some have porches, and many have many potted plants around them. (The basic house has one separated-off room, with 75% of the space being open plan. There is a basic door to the front and to the back of each house, which really helps cool the house, allowing the breeze to flow through, and basic windows. People can enlarge the house - if they have enough land - and can make any prettifications or improvements that they want.) The people seem very happy with them, and have individualised them beautifully.

The British Red Cross have promised that all recipients of an Ides temporary house, will also receive a permanent British Red Cross house. We hadn't thought this would happen yet, but because the two other villages the BRC were planning to build in first are currently badly flooded, so the BRC have moved into Alue Ambang earlier than expected, which is great for the Alue Ambang villagers. The British Red Cross houses are going to have very deep foundations, and hopefully be very stable because this area does receive quite a lot of earthquakes. Teams of Javanese workers are building deep holes in the sandy soil and then inserting metal posts and then pouring concrete on top. There are no completed BRC houses in this village yet, but we have been shown pictures of what they will look like and have seen them in other villages - they are very nice. Although the BRC houses are only 45 square metres, they require a space of 10m x 12m to be built on (overhanging roofs, etc.) So the fortunate have a 6m x 6m (36 square metre) Ides/Festival house and a 45square metre British Red Cross house. Space is a real problem here, and many villages only have small areas of land - so some will have a BRC house only and some an Ides house only. Ides are wonderfully flexible compared to the bigger NGO's and as well as 6m x 6m houses, they have been building 5m x 7m houses, 4m x 7m houses and even 3m x 7m houses where necessary if people just don't have the room for anything bigger.

Well pleased with the houses I have seen. We take some photos for Michael, and Ronald also has a whole set of photographs of each head of family standing proudly in front of their Festival house that we can send to Michael. We plan to see more houses tomorrow, but now it is time to rush back to Ronald and Ellen's house and collect Haggis and the generator that Ides have got hold of to provide power for the show and head to this afternoon's venue. I will write more later......

So busy

SUNDAY 21 JANUARY - Oh dear, it turned out to quite a lot later! We have been so very busy since we got back to Banda from Teunom that I have not had time to keep up with the diary as well as I would have wished. I think I am going to have to be a bit less verbose if I am ever to catch up! So back to the afternoon of Monday 15th.........

He's a performer

A HUGE AUDIENCE IN THE END AT KEUDE TEUNOM! ONE HAPPY PERFORMER!

We head to Keude Teunom where Hags' show is going to take place (we haven't bought the badges, as there will probably be a mass of people and it could turn chaotic). The venue is an open field, with no shade at all. Eek! There are already lots of people sheltering in the few tiny bits of shade around the edge of the field, but Haggis despairs of them every becoming a proper audience in the sun. It is already 4.30 but the sun is still hot. Hags heads off into town to look for a more suitable site for the show, and Ellen and I are left with a big generator looking rather foolish, with lots of people wondering what the hell is going on. Hags returns having found a shady site, but it is next to a temple and someone has to go and ask if a show would be allowed there - the answer comes back that no, it wouldn't be.

Hey ho! Hags is very low and depressed and wants to cancel the show. "Come on", I say, "I know it's not the perfect venue, but Ides have rented a generator to provide power for your sound, and you just HAVE to do the show". Hags is miserable as he thinks he will be in the middle of the field with a large but very distant and scattered audience, which does make for a difficult show. However, once we put the parachute down on the ground for the children to sit on and it looks as though something is happening, a huge circle audience forms - probably 500 people. When Haggis emerges in costume from the kitchen he has been changing in, and sees the huge circle audience, he completely changes, and from having been a worried, unhappy, about-to-cancel-the-show performer, he becomes a super-confident wild thing and does a stunningly good show. Give a performer an audience and they are happy!

Cos he is Hags, and my husband, I keep forgetting he is a performer too - and like all performers, gets temperamental at times. Anyway the show is a huge success, with the audience screeching with laughter and applauding wildly, and Hags is a very happy boy! Wet, wet, wet - but very happy.

Back to the Ides house for supper and then to sleep inside the mosquito net (which unfortunately seems to have a few mosquitoes trapped in it!) We sleep like logs though, as it has been a long, long day.