15/03/10
Kingston graduate in the danger zone
As news of the Haiti earthquake flashed around the world close to 10.00pm on Tuesday 12 January, Ana Beattie received a text from the charity Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters (SARAID). It contained a simple question – was she available to fly out to the disaster zone and help?
"I was desperate to get out there," says the emergency management officer at Surrey County Council. "But the UK was under a foot of ice and snow, and our emergency centre here was working round the clock. I wasn't sure if I could get time off." But Ana's boss gave her permission to go, and once official confirmation came from Haiti that the SARAID team was needed, she met up with the eight other available volunteers at Heathrow airport at 2.30am on the Thursday.
"I'd come across SARAID while I was studying at Kingston," says Ana, 25, who graduated in 2007 with a degree in Environmental Hazards and Disaster Management. "We had some great speakers at Kingston, and one spoke on SARAID's work after the Pakistan earthquake, so after graduating I signed up."
SARAID's team was made up of a range of volunteers, from students to medics. Like Ana, each had been through a rigorous selection and training process to ensure they had the temperament to cope in challenging situations, and trained on everything from equipment to UN protocol.
"Haiti was my first mission and a real baptism of fire," says Ana. "The airport was closed to commercial flights so we landed in the adjoining Dominican Republic. On the flight I prepared myself mentally by imagining some of the sights we'd face. One of the benefits of a small charity is that you get to know the other team members, so you feel comfortable and, above all, safe working with them."
UN guidelines state that the first team in should set up a reception and departure centre, so that's what SARAID did. After helping to co-ordinate the thousands of volunteers arriving in the country, the team handed over to the UN on the Sunday and took a US military helicopter into Haiti, where they worked for five days.
"It was a shocking sight," says Ana. "There were so many displaced people and thousands of tents – from the air it looked like Glastonbury. Every other building was either collapsed or damaged. I thought we'd search day and night – often people who are unconscious during the heat of the day will wake up when it cools down at night – but the security situation was too risky. We had to be escorted to our zone in the daytime by a security team."
The SARAID team joined the other 2,000 search and rescue volunteers from around the world in a secure base camp at the airport. UN workers divided the city into zones and despatched teams to search for survivors.
"One of the saddest sights was a school," says Ana. "It had collapsed like a pancake and you could see books and papers in there. There were small voids in the rubble, so we hoped a child might still be alive. Children can be very resilient." But during her trip, although Ana was able to locate a lot of bodies and inform relatives that their loved ones had passed away, which was important work, they didn't find anyone alive. The team also experienced two large aftershocks, one measuring 6.1. "It's amazing how much the earth can move," she says. "Suddenly there was debris falling, and everyone ran away from the structures."
Ana's team flew home on the Saturday, and she was back at work on the Monday. "Working in a disaster zone puts things in perspective," she adds. "You don't get so worked up if someone's late, for example. Seeing the effects of a quake on people in real life is very different to studying it in books. Haiti is not in the news now but I hope the people and their plight won't be forgotten."
For more information on SARAID, which is staffed entirely by volunteers and funded solely by public donations, visit www.saraid.co.uk.
