Ditches again

There is little work available helping families with their houses, so digging out drainage gutters is pretty much our destiny for the rest of the trip. There are hundreds of kilometers of gutters to do and we complete a few hundred feet a day.

In the morning it was raining and the ditches had water in them, making for lots of messy mud. The current work is along a major thoroughfare, so we have to wear safety vests.

Ditching in the Rain

Rather than dump the dirt and mud in piles, the city wants us to put in in bags. So we laboriously transfer the contents of the wheelbarrows into giant bags that hold probably a half ton. Once these are even partly full, there's no moving them by hand.

Mike Works the Bags

We're still working near the house of the three elderly sisters who offered us coffee. They say they love company and insist on catering our two coffee breaks each day. Since their house is in the middle of a commercial area and the few nearby houses have been demolished or abandoned, they don't have any neighbors. To go with the coffee, they made us some mochi dumplings filled with special brown sugar and miso. They're really very pleased to be able to assist the volunteer effort. Today, we'll take along a balsam fir pillow from Maine to give them as a gift.

Homemade Treats

Behind their house is a hillside maybe 60 feet high. It's so steep we would have trouble climbing it ourselves without a pickaxe. When the earthquake happened, the city's tsunami-warning sirens went off (they're everywhere), the sisters got out of the house and climbed the hillside with a little boost from some neighbors. We can't figure how they did it. Their house did end up with three feet of water inside, but they've since replaced all the tatami mats and paper screen doors and cleaned out the mud and the place looks almost untouched.

The Sisters' House

Tiree in Front of the Famous Hillside

Just down the street, we watched crews taking down a couple stores and houses using big machines. (Sure could use some of these in Haiti!) An older couple were sitting on the sidewalk watching the process. They told us one of the houses had been in their family for five generations. The house didn't look too badly damaged (flooding only) but we guess the land will now be used as parking lot for the surrounding big-box stores. It took only an hour for the grapple machine to reduce a house to a pile of broken lumber. The owners wandered the rubble pile for a while after the machine left.

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In other news.....

Brett and company have been camping out most nights without a tent. Unfazed by the heavy workday, they start out at 8:00 or 9:00 pm and make a two hour climb up the nearby mountain to camp and wake up to the sunrise. We hear they've built a little shelter up there using local materials. They're always back in time for the morning bus. We'd love to do this, but not on a school night!

Happy Campers