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Hands-on Weekend 2017

Over 16-17 September RedR held its annual Hands-on Weekend.

The Hands-on Weekend is designed to give participants a taste of humanitarian life, with practical workshops and talks delivered by bonafide humanitarians. For 2017 the theme was shelter in emergencies: it really had it all with workshops on self recovery, reciproboo structures, refugee camp layouts, and the logistics behind it all!

 

Camping, construction and quiche!

Nearly 60 participants and event coordinators were brought together to a beautiful deer park in Sussex to consider how different shelter elements fit into the overall humanitarian emergency response. With four 1.5 hr practical workshops and six talks delivered by humanitarians over the weekend, we were definitely kept busy!

With the above, we had the opportunity to build their own reconstructions of example humanitarian shelters, such as the reciproboo, as well as getting the chance to view some real life examples of current shelters used in the humanitarian response, for instance those kindly provided by Shelterbox. We heard about non traditional aspects of shelter, and learnt about the importance of empowering beneficiaries.

As well as all of the above, we let our childhood nostalgia loose as we explored in the mud, camped under the stars, and toasted marshmallows by the campfire in the evening. The RedR staff team were especially pleased by how well the bacon butties, quiche and approximately 10 tonnes of coleslaw went down!

 

 

Thank you!

We really couldn't have done this weekend without the support of our event coordinators; Hannah, Doug, Nick, Ellis, Carrie and Alice, and without the help of the workshop facilitators; Simon, Woody, Jamie, Shaun, Livia; and speakers, Richard and Jake, all of who volunteered their time on the weekend to be there.

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