Sunday 23rd April - St George's Day

Attending a 'Grounding'

Rainy again, so presumably the flood will have risen - hopefully not too much - I hope the road to Calang doesn't get blocked - we HAVE to fly back to Banda tomorrow, Monday, otherwise we will miss our flights to Medan, Singapore and London. Hags is feeling quite a bit better, but the rain makes the planned 9am show impossible. We have all been invited to a "Grounding" (rather like a Christening - it is the first time the child is put on the floor, rather than being in a cradle or held in its mother's or family's arms, and there is a religious ceeremony) and Ron and I head off to the celebrations - I sit with the women and admire the beautiful baby and its decorated swinging cradle, and Ron goes off with the men. I talk to a nice lady from Action Contre La Faim. Haggis stays at home to save his strength for the show at 5.00 in the village where we hope Michael's houses will be built.

Inspecting inland

Ron and I head home having eaten lots of black rice pudding with coconut/sugary topping. Hags decides to come with us to the Barracks a little bit inland. This area, a bit higher than sea level, is where people ran to when the tsunami came. Luckily the first wave was not the biggest, and it gave many people warning and allowed them to run or drive away before the second wave, which was the biggest, came a few minutes later. There was then a 3rd big wave and several smaller ones, but it was the second that did the greatest damage. Anwyay this is where people fled, and it is here that they built huge barracks to house the homeless. There were about 2,000 people living here, but most have now returned to their villages, either having been built a new house, or, in many cases, living in tents on the foundations of their old houses. We met a lady who owned no land - this raised for me the whole question of what will happen to those with no land for a house to be built on. Most of the big NGO's will not build houses for people who don't have any land - this is crazy and means that, as so often happens, those without tenure, who are the poorest, will slip through the net. So we start looking for land - we do some sums and then see the man who has some land to sell, then go see the land. Read all about this under separate link Michael Eavis's Glastonbury Festival housing donation......which I will get up as soon as possible.

We go and look at the available land - it is really rural and lovely....

Haggis' last show

Back to the village for Haggis's last show. Ron and the village chief have rounded up a really large audience of about 200 children and 250 adults. It was very funny and was very much enjoyed - a great last show! We have now done 26 different shows and made 1,920 badges - not bad, considering that we didn't have a single venue set up when we arrived! And we have made masses of useful contacts who will hopefully help us organise a bigger tour with a bigger team later this year, if we can get the funding together.

Back to Ides house and type up notes for Michael, download all the pix that have been taken of our visit on Ron's camera (us having left our camera battery charger at Lumba Lumba and our camera being dead as a dodo!) and catch the diary up to date. Hopefully I will have time in Banda tomorrow to get the web diary up to date with text and pix........Need to leave here about 8.15 to catch the helicopter back to Banda tomorrow morning......Probably won't have time to finish this diary or write conclusions till back in England. Goodbye for now!