Kathy Sierra mentioned slow last week. Sometimes slow is the exactly the point as illustrated in this snippet from Marsie's travelogue. She'd volunteered to construct a commemorative garden on tsunami-struck Phi Phi Island (where I was on December 26, 2004).
The garden was the brainwave of a couple who lost their little girl in the tsunami. They wanted somewhere for relatives and friends to come and visit as the current park on the island is only a temporary structure whereas the garden is going to be a permanent fixture.
Part of the garden's charm is that it has been lovingly tended to by the people that have worked on it and everything is totally natural, even the rocks that we used for the wall were collected from the sea every morning by the boys on the boat.
Most of the time we had to share very few implements: a few rakes, shovels and wheelbarrows and so it used to make me smile when a new volunteer would start and with the best intentions declare "lets organise a digger", or have some dynamic strategic plan. They were missing the point really, it somehow seemed fitting that the the garden should take time to complete and not be completed by five men in five days with all the tools at hand.
p.s. I loved how Marsie's tsunami-damaged lodging advertised: "Half a Roof, Full Heart."
p.p.s. I had heard via a (now offline) Reuters Alert in late September that no NGOs came to Phi Phi and rebuilding was an effort by local community groups aided by foreign volunteers on a 'working holiday' such as Marsie.
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