Full feedThe making of the Climate Defenders Camp
More often than not - you only get to see the finished product of our heroic actions -- the brave Greenpeace activists in the photo - doing something awesome to save the planet. And what you rarely see is how they got there or how much preparation it took. In another colourful piece from Rob, the leader of our Climate Defenders Camp in Indonesia, you get to see what happens - behind the scenes - before the press arrives.
As if I don’t have enough to do, Gillo our on the ground web geezer has asked me to write a blog on the construction of the Climate Defenders Camp otherwise known as the CDC; here on the Kampar Peninsula in Sumatra.
We built a camp for the road to Bali project back in 2007, not too far from here actually, in a place called Kuala Cenaku. This time around I thought to do something a bit different. But as I got into the project it became clear that the only way to do a piece of work to the scale that we would like in the run up to Copenhagen was for us to create another static installation like a camp. We need a base for activists and volunteers - somewhere that can become a focal point for the campaign and for community involvement - a hub for communications and a launch pad for activities. Building a camp was the only way to achieve these goals.
We found an optimal location, cleaned out the reeds with a crew of local people and we were ready to start building on October 6! Crikey I thought, that’s only 20 days to the opening. Through the negotiations our practical team had been securing supply lines, availability of materials and sorting out the logistics of getting everything to the site. I think the first load of wood was on the way before we even got a final location sorted - skin of the teeth as we say. But sorted it was and we were away, we bought in Arif from Batam, a professional construction manager with the local dialect (which is Malay rather than Bahasa), and construction started in earnest.
We used coconut timber from community sources scattered around the Kampar peninsula and hired a local construction company, they were fast workers and we often struggled to keep the supply lines up to match their speed, but we did. Things started to take shape very quickly and a good thing too.
Unfortunately we needed to rebuild the toilet though, the guys had built the pit into the water table and that’s not scientifically correct, but rebuilt it was and now we have what Petteri calls the skyscraper toilet, it does look funny, but it is going to mean that excreta will decompose away nicely once we are gone.
One week out from opening, Iyoet from the Jakarta office helped set up solar systems, wiring, sat comms, radios - the works. A couple of Solar Generation volunteers headed up from Jakarta to help too.
All through this time we’d also been hosting media trips (AFP, CNN, Financial Times to name a few), we even got the US ambassador to Indonesia to come for a visit, so quite a lot of logistics in support of these also needed to be handled behind the scenes as everyone furiously worked toward the opening... it does seem like we’ve been “live” already for a couple of weeks with all this going on.
More international activists and volunteers from Jakarta arrived a couple of days prior to the opening, 26 of them in fact…we didn’t have the toilet finished, the kitchen working, the electricity on, the last of the roof structures finished… we were certainly pushing it, but come Sunday 25 we’d done it! 20 days from moving onto site we got it done, and a bloody good thing too because 200 people including all the Indonesian media arrived to open us up the following day. It went well, we made it…whew!
>>Join Rob and the Climate Defenders by signing up to be a climate activist with us!
>>Read Rob's first wonderful rant here.
Images © Greenpeace/ Ardiles Rante
Comments
I as a social thinker and writer I believe and would like to be with you. I will mobilize communities towards climate change resilience.
Posted by: Kumaravel | November 4, 2009 5:00 PM