When we arrived back from KL there was only enough time for us to bring down a couple of houses before we were heading on another trip. This time to Lake Maninjau. This was also the juncture at which Ash and I left the volunteer house, to see a bit more of Sumatra before we left. We were also a little fed up with sleeping out side because the local Minang representatives didn’t want males and females sleeping under the same roof. It wasn’t a big deal, but for a couple of city boys who like their sleep… it was enough to make us grumble.

The little work I did in my final few days was actually pretty interesting, and all of it was on demolition crews. The first house we pulled down looked pretty simple, and other volunteers had already done the hard work prepping the house. Things were made a little more difficult however, as our Indonesian benefactors had requested to get involved in a site, and this was apparently the most suitable.

The jovial, rotund business men spent a couple of hours swinging sledge hammers at precarious walls, tying dangerous ropes around themselves, and standing under the roof without so much as a flat cap, laughing all the while. In the end though we managed to knock down the final walls and use our helpers to pull the roof down. Not only did no one die, but the roof ended up right where we wanted it, and it all looked pretty salvageable.

The second house we took down was to be my final bit of volunteering. The large structure started as a dark, dirty, dangerous beast. It was our job to prep it for a safe and simple pull down. What actually seamed to happen is that we made everything precarious enough to just pull the walls and roof down in one go. This was a sweet finale though as it needed most of the volunteers to pull the thing down, including our translator, driver and house mum. It took a while, but it was all good fun, that ended up with a salvageable building on the floor.

It is tradition at the volunteer house that you say a little good buy in your final meeting. It wasn’t so bad for us as we shared the limelight with about five other leavers. After that we waited for our slack driver to turn up typically late and headed for a night by Lake Maninjau. Good bye Sungai Geringging.

Thanks to Hands On Disaster Response and all the volunteers.