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Sherry's Diary

Re-Construction Work at Visahka, India

Dismantling the destroyed shed

 

[note: Sherry is on the the eastern costal city of Visakha, India.  The city and the surrounding areas were wiped out in a cyclone (or hurricane) that swept through the area in mid-October.  She is there assisting the Visakha SPCA (VSPCA) and its president, Pradeep Nath.  The VSPCA cares for over 700 animals including dogs and farm animals.  Their shelter and facilities were wiped out in the Cyclone and HSI has funded rebuilding the animal shelters and caring for the injured animals.  Sherry is there to oversee the project and offer what aid HSI can.  For assistance, she has called upon the HSI supported teams from the Yudisthira Bali Street Dog Foundation and the Sri Lankan Tsunami Memorial Animal Welfare Trust (TMAWT).  Both groups have sent veterinarian teams to help with the work.  The effort is also being assisted by the animal welfare groups AHEAD, from Ahmedabad, India, and Animal Aid, from Udiapor, India.]

 

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Sherry Grant

Visakha, India

Monday, 24 October 2005

After the dog catching team and the village outreach team were deployed today, we went to the train station to collect Rahul Sehgal, Animal Help Emergency and Disaster (AHEAD) from Ahmedabad.  Traveling has been difficult to get here for several reasons: First,  India is on the move with the up coming Hindu `holiday of Diwali’ commonly referred to as ‘festival of the lights’, which is celebrated to scare the bad spirits from the community.  This has created a logistic nightmare.  Second, the flooding of airports and train stations has hampered travel.  Rahul, like me, was stranded in airports, trains stations and ultimately took the train from Hyderabad to Vizag.  My team in Sri Lanka was two days waiting for a flight to get out for Sri Lanka to Chennai – India is on the move Asia wide and seems to be hampering disaster response logistics more than the monsoon and cyclone weather.

The day was spent with a review of the initial plan; Pradeep, Dr. Kabir Desai and I had developed the day before.  The AHEAD team was busy dismantling the thatched roof cattle shed that remained in tact but stood in a foot of dung and liquefaction.  In order to get this area cleared out the shed needs to come down.  This is okay as this shed needs to come down to accommodate the plan build out on the disaster site.

Pradeep had scheduled the government engineer Mr. Muti to meet us at the VSPCA site to review the plan changes we wanted to make with the initial government plan that was in the process of being approved and ultimately to be funded. Muti agreed that the plans were sensible but did not know if the government would accommodate the roofing changes to slab or tile from the specified asbestos which I could not agree with for people health and safety reasons.  This would have to be further discussed with the Executive Engineer Mr. Prasad.   In the meantime he would call for an estimate for the clearing work and back fill of rock and gravel to raise the 9,500sq foot foundation.  The bid came back within an hour which impressed the heck out of me but the price was infuriating – more than double of what we calculated if we contracted without government connections.

So we suggested that why don’t we go get our own tractor and lorry and see what we could do on price and get within our budget.  We went to the neighboring village where Praveen’s had worked their ABC program previously.  He knew of a couple of fellows who had heavy equipment.  Specifically I asked if we could get a loader with a backhoe. One of my favorite pieces of equipment I might add here!

Long story we short we found a guy who was willing to come and look at the project and give us an estimate.  And as luck would have it he hit our number spot on.  We had a loader and he had a quick job just down the street.  He could have started that night – which was my wish as every hour is precious.  It hadn’t rained in about 18 hours and the soil on the access road was dry enough to get a heavy lorry in and out with tons of dung with out creating further damage.  It wasn’t to be as what was left of the yard lighting was not sufficient to work through the night.  We agreed we would start at 6:30 AM.

I went to bed that night with a short conversation with Ganesha, the Indian deity the remover of obstacles, that the weather would hold long enough to get the dung out and expose terra firma and we could solve the first problem - eliminate the looming 9,500 sq ft. health problem and set the foundation for the first phase of the plan – raising the cattle shed foundation 3 – 5 feet.

 

 

Click here for the VSPCA Website: www.VisakhaSPCA.org

 

 

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