Tents provide disaster victims with shelter – and a measure of privacy

As we put up this tent for them, they watched with a look of wonder on their faces. For the first time in two weeks, they were going to be sleeping under cover.”

Buck has since flown to seven other disaster areas in order to bring aid to victims in Haiti, Madagascar, Columbia, and Peru. Buck estimated that she and the teams she has worked with have distributed more than 1,800 tents, which have provided warmth and shelter to families, but also privacy.

“Privacy is really important to life,” Buck told the Telegraph. “When you’re living out in the open or under tarpaulin, you have none, so a tent gives you back your dignity.”

ShelterBox prides itself on responding quickly to natural disasters, as it consistently gets volunteers on land within twenty-four hours of a disaster warning.  Recently the charity has responded to Hurricane Sandy in Haiti, flooding in Uganda and Nigeria, an earthquake in Guatemala and is now working with refugees from the Syrian civil war who have fled to Iraq.

The charity currently has about 250 response team volunteers, almost a quarter of which are ex-military and people who worked for emergency services.

“Some cultures respect the elderly, so more mature volunteers are required,” Alf Evans, ShelterBox’s operations manager told the Telegraph. “In others, you need female volunteers to calm down volatile situations. Often, men are too proud to accept aid, so you need to talk to the women who will tell you what they need.”

Buck did not plan to spend her senior years in disaster response, but her life changed forever when her husband died of a brain tumor.

“You can either become that awful ‘widow’ word that I hate, or you can do something that you probably wouldn’t have done before,” Buck told the Telegraph. “Graham wrote me a lovely letter when he knew he was going to die. I wasn’t allowed to open it until after he’d died. And in it he said something about my talent for touching other people’s lives. He said I should remember that I still had that skill and that I had to use it.

“Every time I go on deployment, I think about that and I think about Graham. In some ways, he wouldn’t believe it; we were the least outdoorsy people you could imagine. We didn’t ever once go on a camping holiday. But in other ways, I don’t think he’d be in the least bit surprised.”