Merry Xmas and Seasons Greetings

And an especially big thank you to the generosity of all those who have helped us raise £255 for Help for Heroes and Naomi House so far.

So what is Naomi House?

www.naomihouse.org.uk

We are proud to be fundraising for Naomi House children's hospice and jacksplace, which is one of only 4 young person’s hospices in the UK. Naomi House and jacksplace provide residential respite care, emergency and end-of-life care and bereavement support to babies, children and young adults with life-limiting conditions.

    

Located in the Hampshire countryside just outside Winchester and set in beautiful grounds, Naomi House has been providing care to life-limited children since 1997. Respite visits give families and carers the chance to rest and recover from the exhausting activity of caring for their child and the child can take part in a wide variety of experiences including play sessions, music therapy and trips out.

jacksplace is the new hospice unit that has recently been built next door to Naomi House and provides an environment specifically designed for young people with life-limiting conditions to provide as much privacy, independence and dignity as possible for the young people who come to stay.

It costs around £5 million a year to run Naomi House with less than 15% of their income coming from the Department of Health – the remainder comes from charitable donations and other fundraising.

Please join us in helping Naomi House continue the sterling work they do in providing such excellent services and care for young people like Darryl (below).

Please visit our online donation page at:

http://www.justgiving.com/teamdesertrats2

Phoebe has a makeover

With now less than a month left until the off our anxiety levels are starting to rise, but there’s a certain satisfaction in being able to cross the detail items off the “To Do” list.

We’re getting into to the nitty gritty now: the last major jobs on Phoebe - the fitting of a new clutch, fabricating brackets for the spot lights and new tyres all ‘round. The kit list is also starting to take shape with sand ladders, jerry cans, water butts, trenching tools, mess tins and webbing satchels coming from army surplus stores and attics being ransacked for general camping stuff and odds and ends. And even though Phoebe is going to have roof bars fitted, that’s still all rather a lot of stuff to be carrying…

Oh, and someone has also been having creative urges and has unleashed their artistic “talent” on poor old Phoebe…

So who are Andrew and Peter?

Peter is of an age where he should probably be old enough to know better, but is still young enough not to care and to do it anyway.

He works in IT, a career choice that causes people’s eyes to glaze over at parties and for them to turn to one side and say “So then, tell me more about your job, it sounds absolutely fascinating!” to the National Audit Office statistician sitting beside him. His English/German parentage probably accounts for his vertical altitude, his tendency to lay towels on sunloungers first thing in the morning when on holiday and his frankly ambivalent feelings towards a certain event that took place in 1966...

So why this Challenge? For some perverse reason the idea held immediate appeal when first mentioned by Andrew, a work colleague, whilst toiling over a hot VDU at the office – drive an old wreck across the Sahara? But obviously! Now with only 4 weeks to go the reality of what faces them is just starting to sink in (just like the needles involved in the multitude of dratted injections required for numerous vaccinations).

The "Didwepackeverything  and didyoupickupthepassportsandtickets and ohmygodivelefttheovenon" checklist is just a little bit longer for this trip than it would be for a couple of weeks touring in Mainland Europe...

Andrew, with his chronological advantage and the fact that all this was his idea in the first place, is very much the senior partner and the brains behind Team Desert Rats, which he conveys through his gravitas and sensible, mature no-nonsense approach. His somewhat convoluted background brings another nationality to the mix, making Team Desert Rats sound like the opening line for an old-time stereotypical joke; “There’s these blokes, right, English, German an’ Italian. An’ they go for a drive…”

Andrew lives his life by a maxim that sets forth a universal truth that has gained credence through his own long personal experience, namely that; "Growing old is mandatory, Growing up is optional".

Not unconventionally however, Andrew has also been working in IT for a number of years, but has never found it easy answering the question "So what is it that you actually do?" Actually, what he really wanted to be was a pilot like his father, but that's another story...

Born in Italy, Andrew speaks Italian fluently, French pretty well and understands Spanish. With English he struggles, but gets by. As a young lad, he lived in Libya and Nigeria, and spent holidays in Niger, Kenya and The Gambia as well as travelling to South Africa on business. Can we perhaps see a theme starting to develop here?

"Let's drive to Africa. Better still, let's take the Sahara Desert route." was the initial suggestion to Peter. Since that moment and since the moment that Peter, having gone away briefly to mull it over, came back and agreed, it has been an exciting but anxious time.

This then marked the inception of their odyssey…

Big thanks on a small scale

A big thank you to all the 3mm Society members who answered an appeal on the Society forum and donated 6 carrier bags of “stuff” and £25 in cash at the recent West Byfleet meet.

Our intention is that once we have stashed and lashed all our gear into and onto Phoebe we are going to fill up any remaining nooks and crannies with assorted oddments that will be of use to schools in The Gambia, as even the basic essentials can be hard to come by there. 

So the bags of “stuff” that people are giving us contain "drawer clutter" - pens, pencils, rulers, compass/protractors, calculators etc… and this will all be donated to a school once we get to Banjul.