OK First, the number of homeless is reported at around 2 million, which doesn't quite match the number that would be generated by factoring in the average family size to the number of destroyed/damaged houses, but its fine enough.

In Singapore now, on a visa run, as Indonesia's VOA is only for 30 days. Singapore is kind of surreal...
First off, its the only island-city-state I know of in the world. The main ethnic groups are Chinese, Indians, and Malaysians, but the official language is British English. And it's sparkling clean, because the authorities are extremely strict on littering - nobody sells chewing gum because it is outlawed here. So going from a 3rd world disaster zone to this gleaming 1st world metropolitan trading center is sort of jarring.

Got a great view of Mt. Merapi from the plane's window as we were bumping down the runway out of Yogya.

And my left eye is completely bloodshot for some unexplained reason. Maybe its bird flu. Shit, must not joke.

Things have settled down a bit, from the report on HODR, still clearing debris, accepting all sorts of food and tea from the villagers...
Apparently Merapi has been acting up lately, strange how it took a series of emails from halfway across the world to alert us to the fact that a volcano 40km away was growing uppity...
had two tremblers this morning, at 2.30 and ~8.00, ran outside as the mattress started shaking, the alert being spread about the area by bangings on pots and whatnot.

current numbers:
dead: 5749
injured: 38568
homes destroyed: 127037
homes damaged: 451011
homeless: approx. 1.5 million

in the most recent meeting for the early recovery cluster of UNOCHA, we split up into livelihoods, transitional shelter, and terms of reference working groups. sat in on the transitional shelter one, at which we spent 45 minutes delineating that a shelter needed to be:
a) durable for up to 2 years
b) resistant to the elements
c) cheap / made of out of recyclable/reusable materials
d) indigenously contextual, material and technique-wise
e) easy to make
f) incorporable into a permanent structure
g, etc.) and on and on and on,

before getting bogged down on whether the bamboo being used should be treated (with borax) or not, and whether or not they should be called "transitional" or "temporary" shelters...
while at the same time, the situation on the ground is that people are coming up with their own shelters, patched together from whatever they can find - salvaged bamboo, corrugated metal, woven mats, broken bricks, tarpaulins, and reconfigured doors and windows - no matter what we, in our UN NGO vests, with our laptops and new vehicles and drivers and whatnot decide should be the best, most cost-effective option to present to the victims...

anyway, yes things are happening... and i dont even know what that means. time for sleepy sleepy.

Yogya photos!
yay!

Hi guys, another belated update. I love how all my entries start with, "Fuck, I should have updated a week ago..." Seems to me no reason to break the habit now, so here goes...
Scuba Marc and I have been in Indonesia for the past week, but this post will in no way make up for everything that has happened in that time. We have been setting things up for a possible deployment of Hands On Disaster Response, and I am glad to say that it is going to happen. Just not on a huge scale. We're looking at around a steady 12 people, for up to 3 months, as we are only focusing on clearing debris for now, and the work is already well underway.

We have rented a house for our "base" in a village called Sawit, halfway between Yogyakarta, the university capital and cultural center of Indonesia, and Bantul to the south, the most hard-hit area, with the exception of Klaten to the east. It is literally a matter of stepping out the front door to find debris that needs to be sorted and cleared, and the interactions we've had with the villagers even to this point have been amazing. I'm feeling really excited about the whole thing, and hope that those of you who are reading this (if you are even reading this at all) might be able to come down, or know someone who might want to. All the necessary info will be up on the HODR site shortly.

On to a mini-damage assessment. Initial reports were that around 60,000 homes were destroyed, prompting some people to call the earthquake a national disaster, on nternational. But, according to a World Bank report given to its donors, the numbers have reached to 260,000 destroyed, and 417,000 homes in addition to that, that have sustained some sort of damage, and some estimates giving around 1 mill. people affected. Doesnt' sound much like an internal response to me. The problem is, the damage is spread out througout the countryside around Yogyakarta, the heaviest hit areas being Bantul and Klaten, in thousands of little hamlets and isolated households, hampering the efforts of the usual alphabet soup of the big guys (UN, WFP, UNICEF, IFRC, MSF, IMC, IOM, etc., etc., etc.) to move supplies so they trickle out to the ends of the branches. The good thing is that the emergency phase of the disaster is starting to end, and the attention is starting to shift towards Early Recovery. In fact, Marc and I attended the UN-coordinated meeting for that particular cluster, attendance to which had jumped from 4-5 NGOS two days earlier, to around 20 or so. So that's where the action will be in a bit.

It seems that things will go much quicker than what we saw in Biloxi/NOLA, and what the other agencies are seeing in Aceh, as the government here is actually extant/competent, the majority of the infrastructure is still intact, as it wasn't simply wiped away, and the people themselves are taking it very much into their own hands to start recovery/rebuilding, self-organizing into communal feeding systems, patrolling their villages in shifts at night, and actually working with each other to save what building materials can be saved, and clearing off the rest. The energy is amazing, and more than a bit gratifying to be a part of, but it also means we've got to hustle if we are even to be a part of it, which hopefully will happen.

I apologize for the lack of the usual visuals, but the dirt-cheap Internet access found in the multitude of warnet scattered throughout Yogya is PAINFULLY slow, pretty much ruling out large file transfers... although who am I to complain? at least it still exists...

What else, what else... oh yes, Merapi. In the past week, I have had absolutely no contact with the news out there, but it seems what media play Yogya has been getting centers around the possibility of Merapi exploding and wreaking even more havoc, but in actuality, the probability that it will do so is fairly remote, as (according to the head Indonesian vulcanologist,) it is almost entirely a pyroclastic flow, avoiding the build-up of pressure that would lead to an explosion, so no, there will definitely be people further affected, but it will not be the monstrous event the media are wanting to make it out to be. That said, it is definitely something to keep an eye on, which we will definitely be doing... And.. Oh yeah, there was a trembler apparently of about 3.0 the other day, which made the windows of the hotel we were staying in at the time make a weird scratching sound, and you could see the lava flow with your naked eye from our village 40km away last night, which was kind of cool, as I've never actually seen a live eruption before, but... anyway...

time to log off. tired of typing.
more later.

In case you wanted, here is my current address, as best as I can give you...

Sawit-Pangungharjo, Rt. 5 Miri, Sewon, Bantul, Central Java, Indonesia

So some stuff has transpired in the month since I've updated this thing...
Spent a good amount of time sleeping and nichtsing about back at home in Vermont, which was good.
Went to Yale's Commencement. Anderson Cooper spoke. And it was good. Really fucking good.
Screenprinted an assload of shirts for Jamie's track team. Pretty good.
Then this happened. Not so good.
Actually, pretty damn bad.

And so I'm off again, on Wednesday. Flying into Jakarta, hopefully with Scuba.

Here's some pics from Commencement '06.


Old Campus before the onslaught of blustery parents and bored siblings. Note Shrek on the JumboTron.

Wandering around, stumbled into the Graphic Design MFA Show, a world with which I haven't had the remotest of contact in the past year. 'Twas a bit much for the nerves. Especially when the Grad kids recognized me.


Ishaan.

Evelyn. And some guy.

Casey licking her hand. And some guy. Oh, wait...

Sophia. And John's hair.

Slavic Choir. amazing.

qirsten. bedding. down.

Hooray for beautiful mornings.

as i am no longer on the gc, and havent been for the past few days, this blog will hereby switch focus from being solely an on-the-ground account of my time there, to things of related interests, be it by a few degrees or more...

to start things out, here are some really interesting links.
i dont care who you are, and what you say about katrina and rita being part of some 30-year recurring cycle of storm intensity - rising global temperatures, part of the global ecological meltdown that was predicted to be happening years from now, are in the here and now. and heres a fascinating way you can deal with your own contribution to the problem...

and even though they dont directly tackle the root cause of all this carbon in the air, i.e. our ongoing consumption of fossil fuels, maybe this will help by increasing awareness of just how much we are part of problem, and provide some sort of inner motivation to indeed reduce consumption.

or then again maybe it really is just a way for us gas-guzzling, hummer-driving americans to feel good about ourselves.

hooray for glories of capitalism.

I feel I've been fairly delinquent in updating things to the blog.
Lots of things going on... lets see here.

Mayoral election has come and gone, and its come down to incumbent Nagin, and son-of-former-mayor Mitch Landrieu in a runoff to be held on May 20.

Lots of corporate types filing through the site here, checking out where all their money's been going/will be going.

Been fairly sick and/or tired, of which I've become fairly sick and/or tired.

Which has brought me, in conjunction with a myriad of other reasons, to the decision to return home for a month or two of recuperation. Which means this will no longer be an on-the-ground blog. Will do my best to keep it updated with all sorts of relevant information though, because there's no way I'm going to be able to not think about everything down here, even when I'm done. I guess I should have some sort of grandiose thought-provoking observation or another of the past 8 months.. not sure the urge to splurge has hit yet, but I'm pretty sure it will once I get back to Burlington, so keep your browsers peeled. It will come. oh yes, it will come.

spent the past few days wandering about, waiting for it to sink in that there is a modality in which im not here, and i dont think it has quite yet.. as much as i am ready and waiting for the coda, not sure if its entirely.. resolved yet...

anyway, drove over to biloxi today to say goodbye to everybody there, as i fly out of MSY tomorrow. came back and took everybody out to sushi, on the Network. 'Twas awesome, and shit I'm going to miss everyone. quick, before i tear up, look at some pretty pictures:

Helen Catchot. Dealt with the storm by backsliding into the bottle, which she'd given up on her own power three years earlier. Having her grandmother die a few months later, along with losing the house and being harassed by her abusive crackhead boyfriend = not a fun time. Extremely strong woman, we ran across her the first week I was down, with Nurses Carrie and Trish, she's been one of Hands On's darlings.

Helen and her new garden, set up by Niko

Joe Brooks and BA Anderson. Two hardcore guys, Joe rode out the storm in a tiny dingy with his 3 dogs, BA got a foot-long chunk of skin taken off his left leg by a passing a/c unit. For the longest time, Joe, the vietnam vet that he is, was changing BA's dressings in a tent in the middle of debris. Like I said, some hardcore righteous dudes.


Guillermo Olivos. Dartmouth '05. Master of Mold.

Kristin Burlage. Marist '04. Together, we define longterm.


can't get the damn thin white duke remix of royksopp's what else is there? out of my head...