Fire Walking!

Created: 07/12/2007

Fire Walking for children’s charity - our brave project controller Kate Stansfield turns out to be a real bright spark!

We knew Kate was a clever young woman when she joined our Leeds based project team in September having achieved an MA with distinction in Applied Translation studies. She also speaks French and Spanish fluently and is currently learning Japanese. But we didn’t realise quite what a bright spark she was until we discovered that she was attempting a ‘fire walk’ over burning hot coals to raise money for a children’s charity she had helped set up in India in 2001. We’ll let Kate tell you the rest…

It’s surprisingly difficult to dispel the myth that fire walking seriously damages your health… And so I came to volunteer myself for the challenge, feeling responsible that I had persuaded three 2nd year students at the University of Leeds to organise the event in the first place! I remembered how I had felt the previous year, an MA student in the midst of co-organising the 2006 RAG Firewalk. Talk about nail-biting! Meetings held with only two or three potential Firewalkers at a time, people signing up… and dropping out. There’s so much riding on these events being successful, as they can potentially raise hundreds of much-needed pounds for Friends of Antara UK, a small charitable organisation I helped to set up in 2001 when an old school friend returned from a six-month volunteering placement at a psychiatric and rehabilitation centre just outside Kolkata, India.

Six years on, we’ve raised over £50,000 for the centre, enabling the management to build a Children’s Ward, offer free beds to destitute patients and provide a new well, amongst other items. The place itself is unique, aiming to provide free and low-cost mental healthcare to a huge population of people living in poverty and unable to access any other kind of (expensive) mental health services. Antara is more like a village than a community, open to innovative new treatment methods and offering a work therapy unit and other activities such as cultivation, gardening and computer training to its patients. Everything they do there is with the aim of enabling patients, who in some cases have been ostracised by their family or imprisoned by the government due to their illnesses, to lead full and healthy lives and to take an active role in society.

So, what does this Firewalk actually entail? Well, thanks to the University of Leeds fundraising body, RAG, Friends of Antara UK have been able to hire Blaze, the experts in “fire and ice” challenges (blazefirewalking.com) to manage the entire event. A merry (and slightly pale-faced) crew of 17 of us joined our instructor for two hours of intensive “motivational training”, during which he had us reciting the five vowels in a variety of tones, visualising lemons and shouting our names at the top of our lungs. It all proved more useful than we initially thought – by the time we encountered the hot coals (they stoke them to make sure they’re “ready”, i.e. over 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit) we were all pretty much raring to go!

How did it feel? Some say the coals feel cold; one person described them as feeling like Pringles! I can certainly vouch for them being hot – my feet actually felt more like hot coals than feet for a good ten minutes following my Walk, before becoming lovely and tingly by the time I had my socks back on and was sitting in the comfort of the Union for our debrief.

I’d recommend the event to anyone. The instructors tell say that you will go onto the coals one person and come off another. I wouldn’t go that far, but it certainly is a great way to learn more about the psychology of fear, and a fantastic natural high!On the night, thanks to fire-related entertainment from the Circus Skills Society, live acoustic guitar music, our fantastic volunteers with their card and cake stall, and a spot of bucket-shaking, we raised £130. We hope to add close to £1,000 to this by collecting sponsorship money as we near our final target for the Children’s Outpatient Department.

If you would like further information about how to donate money to Friends of Antara UK, what we do or how to get involved in volunteering in the UK or India, please send an email to antara.giving@gmail.com 
 
Congratulations Kate from all of us at Andiamo! 

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