HEAT again

For the third time since I've been in this job, I had to undergo a course of Hostile Awareness Environment Training.  There was some being run locally in my region, but this was just a two-day course taken by recently trained colleagues, and with the countries I'm required to go to now including such hotspots as Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria (the north-east), Cameroon and the Central African Republic, I thought I would be better off taking a full one-week course.

It was held in a military camp just outside Nairobi, with mock villages, crashed cars, and plenty of places for rebels to ambush us (and for soldiers at checkpoints to force us out of our vehicles and make us respond to their demands for 'gifts').  A couple of days in the classroom, a day learning (revising) emergency first aid - and the fun bit, two days 'in the field' dealing with situations such as the one in the photograph above, where gunfire suddenly breaks out and you have to decide what to do.   In the above case I wanted to hide in the long grass just out of view of the picture, but decided I should go with the crowd and run - only to find we'd all failed to notice the signs of landmines and run straight through a minefield.

In fact several times I found my instinct was to do my own thing and not follow the crowd, something I didn't really get feedback on so I don't know if it would save my life or put me at more risk.  For example when we'd watched a film one evening only for 'rebels' to suddenly storm the classroom and leave with hostages, everyone stayed frozen on the floor waiting for them to return - but remembering that the windows were very large (and we were on the ground floor), I escaped through a window ...  Hoping that I never have to test out this tendency in real life, anyway.

Some of the course involved our captors using their power over us to make us run, jump, roll on the ground, sing, even get 'baptised' in pools of mud.  This is me, about to be forced to lie down in that muddy puddle.  They said afterwards that it was to get us to experience and understand what could happen to us; I have to say that I didn't find it difficult - if someone pointing a gun at me says to do a star jump, I do a star jump!  But it was interesting that some fellow course participants who had been through real life situations of such danger (particularly those working in Darfur and Somalia) found some parts of the course too traumatic to take part in as they were reminded too closely of what they'd been through.

I didn't like to trivialise things by asking them whether at the end of their real life ordeals, their shoes had ended up in the same state that mine did at the end of this course!  (& no, I couldn't claim a new pair on expenses)