RescueNet's training elsewhere this time

This year’s venue for the European RescueNet course was the training base in a small Swiss village called Wiler bei Seedorf. After having done the course for 4 consecutive years in the Netherlands it was time for a change. Not only the venue but also the dates changed. Due to practical and logistical reasons we started this year’s course in August already.

A group of 8 keen participants and 4 staff in training from quite a few different nations joined the rest of our RescueNet staff at the base in Wiler for a wonderful 2 weeks of teaching, training, exercises, scenarios and team building. The vast majority of the training was done by our own RescueNet members and was received very well by the participants. We covered topics like the Christian response to crisis, Search and Rescue, Remote First Aid, Trauma Counseling amongst other things. The many scenarios that were set up cemented the lessons learned in the lectures and excited the participants. It also showed them how much they learned in only 2 weeks. The final scenario on the last Friday challenged the group to put everything they learned together and work as a team on solving a difficult scenario and get all the casualties out in a proper manner. They did a great job and surprised the staff in how efficient they proceeded.

In the debriefing we had with the group, one of the participants expressed his excitement in saying: “This course in  total is very complete, every module is necessary and useful. The time is very well used. It was intense and sometimes really exhausting but I think that in real deployments this is quite realistic. I enjoyed this course very much!”.

Five of the participants have already indicated shortly after the course finished that they want to continue with RescueNet and therefore will apply for RescueNet membership. With new applicants RescueNet Europe is growing into quite a group of enthousiastic volunteers ready to respond to the disasters of this world and bring God’s love for all mankind in a very practical way to the hurting people in disaster areas.