15th December, 2009

BRIAN Healy expected to spend the summer of 2005 working behind the bar in the Sands Hotel in Tramore but a chance conversation with Waterford woman, Angela O’Shea, meant that within days he found himself flying over earthquake-devastated Kashmir in a helicopter for GOAL.

As a child, Tramore native Brian Healy’s nocturnal reveries were occasionally filled with important rescue trips to Africa, where he and a friend would unload trucks of food to the needy before hitching a ride back home to Ireland, satisfied that they had done their bit for humanity.

“I wanted to do aid work ever since I saw the news footage from Ethiopia in
1984. Band Aid and the whole Irish response had a huge effect on me. During the G8 summit in July of that year, they showed that old footage again and my desire to do something became stronger than ever,” Brian said.

It may have taken longer than he expected to realise those dreams, but since 2005 Brian has helped GOAL deliver enough aid to the poorest of the poor over the last four years to fulfil those innocent childhood aspirations countless times over.

His first assignment in the developing world was a white-knuckle ride of frightening proportions. Having just turned 31, Brian had returned home for the summer to manage the bar in the Sands Hotel, having spent the previous four years employed as a plastic welder on the continent.

The conversation with Angela O’Shea, who had previously worked as a volunteer for GOAL, set the ball rolling.

“Angela reckoned I had the right spirit and said that she would talk to a friend of hers called Ray Jordan, who was a GOALie at the time,” said Healy. “Not long after that, the earthquake struck in Pakistan and I remember listening to the same Ray Jordan on the radio explaining how bad the situation was in Kashmir.”

A few days later he got the call he had been waiting for.

“I was working away in the bar one evening when I was asked to take a call. It was Ray. I nearly dropped the phone! He put in a few reassuring words and a couple of days later I got a call from GOAL in Dublin. I travelled up by bus to see them that very day. That was a Wednesday. On Saturday, I was flying over Kashmir in a helicopter.”

It was a humanitarian baptism of fire. Brian took on a job as a field logistician and freely admits now that the first couple of days were more than a little intimidating.

At first he didn’t quite grasp the scale of the problem. From the door of the helicopter on that first trip over the town of Bagh, the buildings all seemed fine. It was only when he got down on the ground that he realised what he had been looking at.

“Everything had collapsed; we were only looking at the roofs. When we landed I discovered that every structure in an area equivalent to the distance from Waterford to Fermanagh had been flattened.”

The next problem Brian had to overcome was the dead bodies. About 8,000 people had lost their lives in Bagh alone.

“It was the one thing I did fear, but it was actually okay. I could see a few and obviously I could smell some of them but we were quite lucky as it was approaching winter in Kashmir; if the earthquake had occurred during the summer, the decaying bodies, the disease and the smell would have been unbearable.”

After a well-deserved break, Brian was next sent to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, and although the situation there did not compare to the hectic existence he had experienced in Kashmir, it still brought its own difficulties. It was there that he first saw someone die from hunger.

After seven months in Addis, he was transferred to South Sudan, widely recognised as one of the tougher assignments in the developing world - something he discovered on his first day there.

“We hopped off the plane in Kurmuck and straight into 52 degree heat. It was beyond belief. The place was in a bad way so we had a lot of work to do to get things back in order,” he said. “It was exciting and it was tough. I lost about 14kg through pure sweat. I felt a great sense of achievement flying out of there. We built runways to get supplies in and helped a lot of people.”

Over the last two and a half years, Healy has enjoyed stints in GOAL’s Galway office, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan for a second time.

Although he is currently on a break, he says his work with the organisation is far from over. “Humanitarian work will probably be the hardest work you will ever do,” he says. “You have to be serious about; it’s not just an adventure or for getting a few pictures with the locals; you have to treat it with respect.”

© Waterford News and Star