Day 26: Saturday 8 October 2011 - Red Cross Log Base

The past week or so here have been very busy, which explains the lack of posts recently. My day-to-day routine has been fairly constant through-out as well: wake at 5:30am, drive to base-camp, work until 6pm, drive back to accommodation, swim, work and sleep.

I appreciate that this hasn't been very useful or interesting for any friends or family reading this, so to remedy the situation here is a post about Red Cross Base Camp where I have been working the past 5 weeks.

The Base Camp is fairly large and contains the Red Cross Federation team who work AND live in the camp, as well as many of the national Red Cross teams including the British. The site is based around a large concrete 2-storey structure that I'm told was to be constructed into a Hilton Hotel until the earthquake stuck. This makes sense as the site is located just over the road from Port-au-Prince airport.
Food is provided for us at breakfast and at lunchtime. The kitchen is currently headed by a Danish chef - the food is fairly basic but there's always plenty of fruit and veg so I can't complain. The food in the supermarkets is very expensive - almost three times as high as I would pay in the UK so I'm very grateful that the Red Cross provide this service. The picture below shows part of the eating area. Apparently during the Emergency Phase the Italians provided the food and I was surprised to hear many people complained that it wasn't very good!
Many of the Federation and nation staff must work and live on base camp. For the past year and a half those staff members have had to live in tents without air conditioning which must have been extremely uncomfortable. Recently, shelters have been provided for the staff containing all the basic amenities.
I was amazed to see that some of the teams are working in these dome-shaped shelters. Even more incredible is that I've seen several of them being used by beneficiaries in Port-au-Prince. They really are ugly and totally inpractical.
Whilst cholera still has a presence in the country hand-washing is an absolute must after using the loo and before and after every meal:
These are the converted shipping containers that we work in. They're not terribly spacious, but they have sufficient light and air-conditioning. There is a separate container for each of the project's teams: logistics, finance, shelter, watsan, livelihoods and communiications.
I work closely with the shelter delegate and the head of delegates. On a day-to-day basis I also work very closely with the national staff to provide support and technical guidance. They're a really great team of people: very hard-working with an eye for detail.
And finally, here's one of the British Red Cross vehicles waiting to take us back home at the end of a busy day:

Day 26: Monday 3 October - presenting the results of geospatial analysis

This weekend I finalised the results of the physical building attributes which were reported in detail in yesterday's post. One of the objectives of my work here is to determine in what format agencies would like the geospatial data and results to be produced and presented. After discussing this with the team here in Haiti I have decided to present the data in several different formats. Each piece of work I will produce for BRC will be presented as 1. a written report, 2. a cleaned excel sheet (for further analysis of data), 3. a cleaned GIS shapefile (for further GIS analysis and modification), 4. JPEGS of main maps and figures and 5. Google Earth files to allow the results to be visualised by those outside of the country and/or those without access to GIS.

The video below shows an example of two of the datasets being viewed in Google Earth. First the number of storeys is visualised as 3D polygons (1-storey = yellow; 2-storey = orange and 3-storey = red). The building plot status is then visualised. Note that the attributes for each building may be viewed by clicking on the building of interest: