May was busy and we barely kept track of everything we sent out into the field.  June now begins and we’re waiting on sheet metal shipments and funding–a slow start. Everyone feels good about the work we’ve done to date and some statistics are beginning to emerge:

56 tons of metal sheeting have been delivered.

16 tons of rice, dal, and cooking oil.

Over 1000 families covered and sheltered with metal sheeting.  

We can’t sit around and wait for India to decide when to ship metal to Nepal so we’re moving forward.  For June, we plan the following:

–Head out to Sindhupalchowk with a Nepali engineer to discuss with villagers how best to re-purpose their rubble to construct  more earthquake resistant structures.  The government subsidy for reconstructing destroyed homes is woefully inadequate–we saw this coming.  Villagers are simply going to rebuild their homes the same way and with the same materials unless we can give them the means to tweak their methods to add strength.

—Begin village-based disaster prep. Starting with school presentations, we will seek to identify village resources, assign disaster roles and explore the feasibility of disaster cache’s while teaching basic first response skills.   We did this 15 years ago with sanitation and it seemed to work well.  Above all, we teach self-reliance and to absolutely not wait for the government to send help.

–Sanitation.  This is our area.  We’ll scout the adequacy of currentt/destroyed latrines and establish latrine capacity needs.  Villagers dig, line and cover the structures themselves.

–Continue sheet metal deliveries as supplies free-up and expand the use of our new coupon system ( pictured above).  This has been a wild success and has allowed villagers to access sheet metal locally while saving us money and the very real potential of road-hijacking during transport.

–Deliver our ever-expanding supply of tarps (Thanks Justin Langford, Sparks Fire Department, Minden and Douglas Fire, and the people of Central Nevada).  Tarps are a quick, emergency give, so we will wait until the monsoon hits and distribute.  They don’t last long, but will be vital for the first few weeks of rains.

So, watch this space for updates.

Jim