It’s 2.53am, in early December,
and seven mud-caked, sleep-deprived people are shivering through a second night
in a tent on a Cornish airfield. Bursts of torrential rain blast all sides of
the fly sheet like close-range machine gunfire. Gusts of up to 75mph are tugging
at the guy ropes and the temperature has dropped to -3C. Inside, people are
shaking and whimpering and willing it to be daylight. And one of those people is
me.
I roll over in my sleeping bag. Technically, it’s a sleeping bag inside a sleeping bag inside a blanket. I’m wearing all the clothes I could carry with me to Predannack, a Ministry of Defence air base 17 miles south-west of Falmouth – and still my whole body is numb.
For two days we have eaten nothing but freeze-dried ration packs, worked for 14 hours straight and completed hour after hour of gruelling outdoor challenges, including a late-night tsunami simulation (which involves navigating to an excavation point in the dark with two 'casualties’). Sleep, if only the rain would stop to make it possible, seems a long way off.
For more than 220 response-team volunteers at ShelterBox, a Cornwall-based charity that provides emergency shelter and supplies to those made homeless by conflict or natural disaster, this is a familiar scenario. The course I’m on – Understanding Field Operations – is a condensed version of a nine-day programme used to select the relief workers who will deliver its lifesaving green boxes worldwide.
As well as eight nights in a tent in sub-zero conditions, volunteers have to complete hours of rigorous “top secret” activities, including disaster role-plays, fitness tests and night-time wake-up calls.
“They run you ragged,” explains Sharon Donald, 34,The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. who has volunteered with the charity in Indonesia and Colombia since 2009. “I nearly dropped out after the first night, it was that miserable. It’s so tough because that’s what it can be like out on deployment. They have to be sure you’re prepared for whatever is thrown at you.”
Response-team members come from all walks of life. Donald, from Birmingham, is a police sergeant. Her husband Chris, a detective, is also a volunteer, currently in Nigeria. Among their colleagues are teachers, firemen, accountants,An indoor positioning system (IPS) is a term used for a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building. bankers, lawyers, soldiers and retirees.
They don’t require specialist experience or skills; and they are not all super-fit – volunteers range in age from 20 to 77. What they share is a pledge to devote at least two weeks a year to ShelterBox, sacrificing their time to go overseas and work in dangerous conditions, unpaid, bringing aid to those in need.
David Webber, 64, a retired builder from Dorset, has been on more than 20 deployments for ShelterBox. Last month he returned from Iraq, where he was putting up tents in a camp for Syrian refugees. “They were desperate for shelter. One tent had 21 people living in it,” he says. “When you have the choice between sleeping out in the cold with a two-week-old baby or having a roof over your head, it’s an easy decision.”
Founded in 2000 by Tom Henderson, a former Royal Navy search-and-rescue diver, ShelterBox’s HQ is in Helston, and it has become the first project partner of Rotary International.
Henderson’s ethos was simple – “what would my family need to survive if we lost everything?” – and he saw a demand for a small charity that could be on the ground, delivering shelter, within 48 hours of disaster striking. In 12 years, the charity has chalked up 200 missions – including to victims of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, flooding in South America and conflict in West Africa. Among the countries where response teams are currently operating are the Philippines, Iraq, Guatemala and Nigeria.
In each of the charity’s green boxes (they weigh 55kg and cost 590 to assemble and deliver) is a tent, manufactured by Scottish company Vango, and designed to withstand extreme temperatures, wind speeds and rain. There’s a thermal layer that increases the internal temperature by 5C and removable curtains to afford privacy. Some families whose homes were flattened in the Haiti earthquake two years ago are still living in ShelterBox tents.
The kit also contains a water purifier, blankets, pots and pans, a cooking stove, tool kit and basic school materials for children.
Putting up the tent is the first challenge of our course. The canvas is sturdy and easy to assemble – there are coloured tags rather than written instructions to avoid language difficulties – but it takes seven of us an hour to rig up the guy ropes and stamp the pegs into the ground.
By the time we’ve finished, it’s dark and we’re fumbling around in head torches, desperate to get out of the biting cold. It’s strenuous work – and that’s after a good night’s sleep in my own bed the night before. Doing this daily in a disaster-struck village abroad, where there’s no food, water or sanitation for miles, doesn’t bear thinking about.
At night, with the wind howling across the airfield, we are urged to remember the millions of people who have made their homes in these canvas shelters. Louise Kimani, a teacher from Kenya, gave birth to her baby, Favour, in a ShelterBox tent in 2008 after fleeing political violence. Four-year-old orphan Carlos, who had a leg amputated after it was crushed by rubble in Haiti, recovered in one. Volunteers said that when he was given a colouring book from the green box, he smiled for the first time in two weeks.
Volunteers register their availability online and continuously check weather reports and security assessments from aid agencies such as the Red Cross to find out where they might be needed. When their phone rings, they are usually at the airport within 24 hours. Delivery of boxes is arranged through a local contact (“Sometimes it’s a covert meeting with a stranger in a coffee house. Sometimes it’s top-table discussions with the UN,” says Webber) and transport is by any possible means: rickshaws, camels, canoes and helicopters are all used.
Because it drew its first recruits from the emergency services, the charity is run with military precision. Our tasks on the course include navigation, team-building, exam-style tests and a lecture on “psychological responses to disaster”, run by survival experts with 100 years’ military experience between them.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale turquoise beads from china,
Amid discussion of cold water immersion and what to do if your hand is chopped off by a machete, we are talked through the essential kit that volunteers might need in a disaster zone and shown how to use satellite phones, GPS trackers, compasses and firelighters.
Ross Preston, the head of operations, was in the Royal Marines for 18 years before joining ShelterBox. He got involved after an improvised explosive device left him with spinal damage and deaf in one ear, ending his Armed Forces career. “I’m no stranger to human misery,” he says, “but on my first deployment to Congo it was nice not to be part of that misery – to know I was making it better, not worse.”
Preston, 39,Interlocking security cable tie with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals. a father-of-three from Devon, runs ShelterBox response teams around the world. In front of him, a smartphone buzzes every few minutes with mission reports from Cuba, Nigeria, Iraq, Haiti and Senegal. A sick volunteer in Uganda needs to be helicoptered to safety, while an operative in the Philippines is concerned that a typhoon could wreak widespread destruction.
But not all of ShelterBox’s work consists of James Bond-style rescue missions. Most volunteers operate behind-the-scenes: fund-raising, speaking to schools and community groups and packing boxes in the Helston base.China plastic moulds manufacturers directory. A vast building just outside the town centre, it contains ready-packed boxes (including 224 about to be shipped to Iraq) and essential items stacked in neat lines: pens and pencils, blankets, solar-powered light bulbs and a crate labelled “disaster bears”, containing 250 handmade teddies from a knitting group in Exeter. In the next decade, ShelterBox plans to distribute 50,000 boxes a year.
After three days in a tent, squelching through mud and dressing in the dark, all seven of us are frozen, grubby and grumpy. We’ve taken down our shelter (practically floating in a pool of icy water by the end), charged across the countryside and bonded over eating breakfast, lunch and dinner out of tiny foil packets.
Despite mud-spattered boots and wind-blasted faces, we’re all feeling one thing inside: utterly humbled by the people we’ve met and the sacrifices they make to help strangers on the other side of the world rebuild their lives.
I roll over in my sleeping bag. Technically, it’s a sleeping bag inside a sleeping bag inside a blanket. I’m wearing all the clothes I could carry with me to Predannack, a Ministry of Defence air base 17 miles south-west of Falmouth – and still my whole body is numb.
For two days we have eaten nothing but freeze-dried ration packs, worked for 14 hours straight and completed hour after hour of gruelling outdoor challenges, including a late-night tsunami simulation (which involves navigating to an excavation point in the dark with two 'casualties’). Sleep, if only the rain would stop to make it possible, seems a long way off.
For more than 220 response-team volunteers at ShelterBox, a Cornwall-based charity that provides emergency shelter and supplies to those made homeless by conflict or natural disaster, this is a familiar scenario. The course I’m on – Understanding Field Operations – is a condensed version of a nine-day programme used to select the relief workers who will deliver its lifesaving green boxes worldwide.
As well as eight nights in a tent in sub-zero conditions, volunteers have to complete hours of rigorous “top secret” activities, including disaster role-plays, fitness tests and night-time wake-up calls.
“They run you ragged,” explains Sharon Donald, 34,The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. who has volunteered with the charity in Indonesia and Colombia since 2009. “I nearly dropped out after the first night, it was that miserable. It’s so tough because that’s what it can be like out on deployment. They have to be sure you’re prepared for whatever is thrown at you.”
Response-team members come from all walks of life. Donald, from Birmingham, is a police sergeant. Her husband Chris, a detective, is also a volunteer, currently in Nigeria. Among their colleagues are teachers, firemen, accountants,An indoor positioning system (IPS) is a term used for a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building. bankers, lawyers, soldiers and retirees.
They don’t require specialist experience or skills; and they are not all super-fit – volunteers range in age from 20 to 77. What they share is a pledge to devote at least two weeks a year to ShelterBox, sacrificing their time to go overseas and work in dangerous conditions, unpaid, bringing aid to those in need.
David Webber, 64, a retired builder from Dorset, has been on more than 20 deployments for ShelterBox. Last month he returned from Iraq, where he was putting up tents in a camp for Syrian refugees. “They were desperate for shelter. One tent had 21 people living in it,” he says. “When you have the choice between sleeping out in the cold with a two-week-old baby or having a roof over your head, it’s an easy decision.”
Founded in 2000 by Tom Henderson, a former Royal Navy search-and-rescue diver, ShelterBox’s HQ is in Helston, and it has become the first project partner of Rotary International.
Henderson’s ethos was simple – “what would my family need to survive if we lost everything?” – and he saw a demand for a small charity that could be on the ground, delivering shelter, within 48 hours of disaster striking. In 12 years, the charity has chalked up 200 missions – including to victims of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, flooding in South America and conflict in West Africa. Among the countries where response teams are currently operating are the Philippines, Iraq, Guatemala and Nigeria.
In each of the charity’s green boxes (they weigh 55kg and cost 590 to assemble and deliver) is a tent, manufactured by Scottish company Vango, and designed to withstand extreme temperatures, wind speeds and rain. There’s a thermal layer that increases the internal temperature by 5C and removable curtains to afford privacy. Some families whose homes were flattened in the Haiti earthquake two years ago are still living in ShelterBox tents.
The kit also contains a water purifier, blankets, pots and pans, a cooking stove, tool kit and basic school materials for children.
Putting up the tent is the first challenge of our course. The canvas is sturdy and easy to assemble – there are coloured tags rather than written instructions to avoid language difficulties – but it takes seven of us an hour to rig up the guy ropes and stamp the pegs into the ground.
By the time we’ve finished, it’s dark and we’re fumbling around in head torches, desperate to get out of the biting cold. It’s strenuous work – and that’s after a good night’s sleep in my own bed the night before. Doing this daily in a disaster-struck village abroad, where there’s no food, water or sanitation for miles, doesn’t bear thinking about.
At night, with the wind howling across the airfield, we are urged to remember the millions of people who have made their homes in these canvas shelters. Louise Kimani, a teacher from Kenya, gave birth to her baby, Favour, in a ShelterBox tent in 2008 after fleeing political violence. Four-year-old orphan Carlos, who had a leg amputated after it was crushed by rubble in Haiti, recovered in one. Volunteers said that when he was given a colouring book from the green box, he smiled for the first time in two weeks.
Volunteers register their availability online and continuously check weather reports and security assessments from aid agencies such as the Red Cross to find out where they might be needed. When their phone rings, they are usually at the airport within 24 hours. Delivery of boxes is arranged through a local contact (“Sometimes it’s a covert meeting with a stranger in a coffee house. Sometimes it’s top-table discussions with the UN,” says Webber) and transport is by any possible means: rickshaws, camels, canoes and helicopters are all used.
Because it drew its first recruits from the emergency services, the charity is run with military precision. Our tasks on the course include navigation, team-building, exam-style tests and a lecture on “psychological responses to disaster”, run by survival experts with 100 years’ military experience between them.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale turquoise beads from china,
Amid discussion of cold water immersion and what to do if your hand is chopped off by a machete, we are talked through the essential kit that volunteers might need in a disaster zone and shown how to use satellite phones, GPS trackers, compasses and firelighters.
Ross Preston, the head of operations, was in the Royal Marines for 18 years before joining ShelterBox. He got involved after an improvised explosive device left him with spinal damage and deaf in one ear, ending his Armed Forces career. “I’m no stranger to human misery,” he says, “but on my first deployment to Congo it was nice not to be part of that misery – to know I was making it better, not worse.”
Preston, 39,Interlocking security cable tie with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals. a father-of-three from Devon, runs ShelterBox response teams around the world. In front of him, a smartphone buzzes every few minutes with mission reports from Cuba, Nigeria, Iraq, Haiti and Senegal. A sick volunteer in Uganda needs to be helicoptered to safety, while an operative in the Philippines is concerned that a typhoon could wreak widespread destruction.
But not all of ShelterBox’s work consists of James Bond-style rescue missions. Most volunteers operate behind-the-scenes: fund-raising, speaking to schools and community groups and packing boxes in the Helston base.China plastic moulds manufacturers directory. A vast building just outside the town centre, it contains ready-packed boxes (including 224 about to be shipped to Iraq) and essential items stacked in neat lines: pens and pencils, blankets, solar-powered light bulbs and a crate labelled “disaster bears”, containing 250 handmade teddies from a knitting group in Exeter. In the next decade, ShelterBox plans to distribute 50,000 boxes a year.
After three days in a tent, squelching through mud and dressing in the dark, all seven of us are frozen, grubby and grumpy. We’ve taken down our shelter (practically floating in a pool of icy water by the end), charged across the countryside and bonded over eating breakfast, lunch and dinner out of tiny foil packets.
Despite mud-spattered boots and wind-blasted faces, we’re all feeling one thing inside: utterly humbled by the people we’ve met and the sacrifices they make to help strangers on the other side of the world rebuild their lives.
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