Sri Lanka Journal- Andew and Annette Dey 2/5/2005

Journal Entries

Home
Photos!
Special Photos
Jan 17, 2005
Jan 18, 2005
Jan 21, 2005
Jan 23, 2005
Jan 24, 2005
Jan 25, 2005
Jan 26, 2005
Jan 27, 2005
Jan 28, 2005
Jan 31, 2005
Feb 1, 2005
Feb 2, 2005
Feb 3, 2005
Feb 4, 2005
Feb 5, 2005
Feb 6, 2005
Feb 8, 2005
Feb 9, 2005
Feb 12, 2005
Feb 14, 2005
Feb 16, 2005
Feb 18, 2005
Feb 19, 2005
Feb 20, 2005
Feb 21, 2005
Feb 23, 2005
Feb 24, 2005
Feb 28, 2005
March 1, 2005
March 2, 2005
March 3, 2005
March 4, 2005
March 5, 2005
March 6, 2005
March 7, 2005
March 8, 2005

Links from Andrew and Annette:

Pro Photographer Dixie's web site

Mondo Challenge set up Andrew and Annette's trip.

Unawatuna is the village where they're staying and working

In the north, Andrew and Annette are working with Norwegian People's Aid. NPAID is partnered with the German organization called Arbeiter Samariter Bund.

Bensonwood.com

Andrew

Although the local government had originally said that their surveyors would lay out the location of each shelter in the camps, we are coming to realize that this will not happen anytime soon. Mr. Suda, the Commander of the Task Force with jurisdiction over our camps, has given us a diagram showing the relationship of each group of ten houses—two lines of five—to the toilet complexes that have already been located. We calculate several key diagonals, purchase colored nylon line in town, and load up on the wooden stakes that are used to mark minefields.

Tony drives with us to the camps. Just north of Elephant Pass, we pull up behind a slow-moving flat-bed truck with a stinger crane mounted on the back.

“In Bagdad, they call those trucks ‘looters,’” Tony tells us. “They were the tool of choice for stealing heavy things like generators.” Before coming to Sri Lanka last November to oversee demining operations for Norwegian People’s Aid, Tony had done two five-month tours with NPA in Iraq. His work there consisted mainly of defusing UXO (unexploded ordinance), rather than removing mines. What was that work like?

“Well, it was interesting, because I was working with some ordinance that I had never seen before, and I was occasionally shot at. It was not that different from working in Northern Ireland. I saw some ordinance in Iraq that shouldn’t have been dropped.”

What does he mean by that?

“I don’t think it had been tested sufficiently. It wasn’t ready to be used.”

At the job site, Roy (the site foreman) has assembled several carpenters and laborers to help with the layout. We string a line over the centers of the toilet pits, and use 3:4:5 right triangles to establish perpendicular lines from that. We try to explain our strategy to the helpers as we go. When one of the carpenters asks why we are measuring dimensions that do not show up on our drawings, we realize that 3:4:5 right triangles may not commonly be used. Some of them seem to catch on.

Precalculating the diagonals for the layout simplifies the layout process, and in about an hour we have staked the corners of the first ten shelters. We have had to make several judgment calls to work around the few palmyra trees left on the site. In one instance, we squeeze the shelters closer by a couple of feet; in another, we stretch the distance to bypass a clump of trees. As we are finishing the layout, the boy who lost his mother and his siblings brings us tea.

It feels good to be working out on the site. With the locations of the first shelters staked, the lack of timber—we have yet to see a load arrive—is painfully apparent.