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Plumbers and penguins

Rothera research station, on the western shore of the Antarctic peninsula

When the British Antarctic Survey advertised for people to work in one of its remote outposts, thousands of people applied. So what has life been like for those who got the jobs?

The call went out for plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, electricians and doctors. They needed to have a love of adventure and be ready for “the most exhilarating experience of a lifetime”.

In the summer of 2009, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) advertised a number of jobs on their most southerly research stations The contract was for 18 months. So as the time for the successful candidates comes to an end, has the job lived up to their expectations?

Mark Green, a 48-year-old plumber from Bristol, was sent to Halley Research Station on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula. His job is to keep water supplies going in temperatures of minus 50C.

Thirty-year-old Claire Lehman, a recently qualified Wiltshire GP, was posted to Rothera, on the western shore of the peninsula.

Poles apart

Dr Claire Lehman on life as an Antarctic GP

I read about the job whilst still at medical school and since then working for the British Antarctic Survey became one of my dream jobs. The prospect of working somewhere so incredibly beautiful and in such a remote location was really appealing, both as a professional and personal challenge.

It is hard to convey in words, or even by photographs the sheer beauty of Rothera. Majestic peaks rising above the glaciers tumbling down into the sea, with Rothera lying in the midst of all this… for seven months I was one of only 22 people who had the privilege of this playground.

Here people make every effort to help each other out. Last year I was trying to find a star-shaped cookie cutter to no avail. A few hours later Jonny the mechanic presented me with a freshly-fashioned home-made cookie cutter!

I think I have a greater appreciation of what is really important in life. I think I have also developed a greater degree of resilience, able to cope with setbacks and challenges.

However, 18 months is a long time to be away. I am so looking forward to being reunited with my friends and family

Both left behind the comforts of home and family for a place with no shops, minimal luxuries and 108 days a year without sunlight.

But they were not alone in seeing the appeal of life in this bleak landscape.

In an attempt to attract as wide a pool of applicants as possible, job advertisements were placed in publications ranging from Farmer’s Weekly to red-top tabloids.

Out of more than 2,000 applicants, Mark was chosen. It meant leaving behind his wife Anna and son Jake. But his family were fully behind his decision to accept the post.

“Oh, 100%, I was told if I got it I had to go,” he says. “I wanted a change, challenges, adventure and to see a beautiful place. I was particularly keen on all the new skills that I would be taught.”

However much his trade might have been valued back home, it is crucial at an outpost like Halley.

While Antarctica is a vast natural laboratory, helping researchers understand how the world works, the scientists depend on the support of workers like Mark to keep the base going.

Miles from anywhere, with no mains sewage, the work of plumbers in particular is crucial.

“Everyone who works in Antarctica has a really important job to do,” says Linda Capper of the BAS.

“To work in the Antarctic, you need to have a good support system around you. So we employ a lot of trades people – plumbers, electricians, carpenters, chefs – to make sure that the scientists are able to do the work.”

Typically earning around £23,000, the trades people are briefed before they depart about the hazards of working in such an icy environment.

“You miss people more than you miss places”

Mark Green Plumber

In particular, the job becomes especially arduous during the coldest months of the year because the bases are run by a skeleton staff known as the Winterers – among whose number included Mark and Claire.

Of course, no amount of instruction can truly prepare someone accustomed to the British climate for the harshness of this wilderness, as Mark remembers the first time he set foot on Antarctic territory.

“I got out of the plane and it was minus 16C and over 20 knots winds,” he says. “And that was the first taste.

“The biggest surprise, apart from actually getting the job and not falling off the bottom of the earth, was the sheer savage beauty of the place.”

However, he quickly came to appreciate his new home. Four weeks into his stay, he was taken on an expedition and promised a spectacular view.

“All the ice cliffs were revealed to us along with about 2,000 penguins, I would have thought, on the sea ice. It was just a fantastic sight.

“We spent about two hours in amongst the penguins. If you sit there and make yourself small and be quiet they will come and investigate you. They’re not shy of having their photo taken. It was a day I’ll remember all my life.”

Most of Mark’s time, however, was more prosaic, as he set about attending to the base’s plumbing.

He saw how tasks which would be considered run of the mill in the UK were of critical importance in the Antarctic. When a melt water tank became blocked, for instance, it had to be quickly cleared to prevent the whole thing solidifying.

Chris Martin, who manages the facilities at Rothera, says plumbers face the additional pressure of knowing that thawing out frozen pipework can be virtually impossible in a climate like that of Antarctica.

“It can be very nerve-wracking for a plumber down there who maybe has a fault on something that he can’t quite trace or predict how it’s going to behave,” he adds.

So far from civilisation, Mark found that the marking of special occasions takes on an extra ritual significance. One of the most important days in the Antarctic calendar comes when the sun disappears for 108 days, and the Union flag is duly lowered at the BAS bases.

FIND OUT MOREPlumbers and Penguins is on Monday, 27 December on Radio 4 at 1100 GMTOr listen to • Plumbers and Penguins on the iPlayer

For Mark, though, the most emotional was, unexpectedly, Burns Night. In his Bristolian tones, he read to his fellow revellers the Scottish bard’s poem The Gowden Locks of Anna – with his wife, of the same name, in mind.

It was an event he recounted to Anna in one of his many e-mails home.

“She said she read it and had a tear in her eye,” he says. “The e-mail contact is really precious.

“I’m not missing home – I’m missing my wife, Jake and my mum. You miss people more than you miss places, I think. This is a wonderful place to be. I’ll see trees and stuff when I get back.”

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Average British man ‘put on 16lb’ in last 15 years

Rail conductors walk out over pay

Northern Rail is running a revised timetable

Ending on a high

Mr Lula da Silva is leaving office as the most popular president in Brazilian history

Francisco de Souza has just got back home after 17 years away.

Returning was his plan all along since he left the small town of Tiangua, in the state of Ceara, to flee the extreme poverty of the Brazilian north-east.

Mr Souza’s story echoes that of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and millions of other north-eastern migrants who had to leave in search for a better life in the much richer south – and found it.

Thanks to Brazil’s economic growth during the Lula years, many have now the choice of going home with their heads held high.

President Lula da Silva, who steps down on 1 January, will leave behind a booming economy and a faith in the future unseen in Brazil for decades.

“We both started with nothing and made a lot of our lives,” said Mr Souza.

“When I went to Sao Paulo, I didn’t even have shoes to wear,” he recalls. “Now I am back home as the owner of three houses, with my car, with money to set up a small business and a beautiful family.”

The business Mr Souza is about to start is a good illustration of the changes in the once hunger-stricken region that both he and President Lula left years ago.

“I am going to open the first shop of food supplements for athletes of my town,” he says.

Like President Lula, Francisco de Souza started with nothing and made something of his life

The north-east remains the poorest part of Brazil, but it is now growing faster than any other region.

The city of Garanhuns – which Lula’s family left back in the 1950s because of total lack of opportunities – is about to get its first shopping mall.

“The new mall is proof that our region is developing and that investors believe that economic growth is here to stay,” said the development secretary of Garanhuns, Ornilo Lundgren Filho.

“All of this is only happening in Brazil thanks to a man that left our city as a poor child and, against all odds, became the best president Brazil has ever had,” says Mr Lundgren.

Optimism is in the air in the Saturday market of Garanhuns where farmers and villagers gather to trade and talk.

PRESIDENT LULABorn to a poor family in north-east Brazil, worked as shoe-shine boyTrained as metalworker, became union leaderFounded Workers PartyElected president in 2002 and 2006Movie of his life, Lula: Son of Brazil, entered for 2011 OscarsLula’s legacy for Brazil’s next president How President Lula changed Brazil In pictures: Lula’s political journey

“I am 66 years old and I tell you that Lula’s government is the best I have seen in my life, and I don’t say that only because we are from the same hometown. There’s been change all over the country,” said rancher Luis Silva.

Mr Silva is from Caetes, which was a district of Garanhuns when Lula was born, but became an independent city years later. Now, both claim to be hometown of the most popular president in Brazilian history.

Part of Brazil’s economic success under Mr Lula da Silva’s government has to do with the great number of people who managed to move up the social ladder.

The money of this new middle class helped Brazil escape the global financial crisis relatively unharmed.

The rise of 30 million people from poverty is one of Lula’s undisputed legacies – and a major reason for his status as Brazil’s most popular president ever.

But his critics – and even many allies – say Lula’s success was built upon the economic stabilisation brought about by the highly unpopular previous government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

Some communities, such as the Xucurus, are still waiting to become part of Brazil’s boom

“Inflation was reaching the heights of 3,000% per year in 1994 when Mr Cardoso, who was then finance minister, implemented the economic plan that beat inflation.

Because of that plan, he won the presidential elections and started a series of reforms,” says political scientist Bolivar Lamounier, a close friend of former President Cardoso.

Mr Lamounier says President Lula inherited a country ready for growth and managed to make the most of it.

“Lula’s legacy is certainly sizeable. The expansion of governmental social programmes was his greatest achievement.”

But Mr Lamounier notes that a lot has been neglected, particularly investment in infrastructure.

“During the eight years of President Lula da Silva’s government, there was almost no investment in essential areas such as transportation and energy.”

The government has launched an ambitious $1.2tn (£780bn) project to revamp the infrastructure, but so far not much has happened on the ground.

“When light gets here, it will be the first sign ever of the presence of the state in this community”

Humberto Pessoa Government engineer

There are serious concerns, for example, about the readiness of Brazilian airports for the 2014 World Cup and the Olympic Games two years later.

Brazil will need to keep growing fast over the next few years if it is to extend the benefits of development to everyone in the country.

Even though changes over the last decade have been dramatic, many pockets of poverty persist both in the big cities – the violent “favelas” – and the countryside. Brazil remains one of the most unequal societies in the world.

Only two hours’ drive from President Lula’s hometown, 50 families living in an indigenous Xucuru community are still waiting to be connected to the electric grid, even though they see lines passing over their heads.

Almost all adults in the village are illiterate and the only school was inaugurated only a couple of years ago by a missionary group.

“We didn’t even know that these people were here until we were warned by the missionaries,” says Humberto Pessoa, a government engineer locally responsible for the federal programme to connect countryside communities to the electric grid.

“When light gets here, it will be the first-ever sign of the presence of the state in this community.”

But these are challenges for Mr Lula da Silva’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, whose main campaign pledge was to continue his work.

Mrs Rousseff is usually described as an efficient manager who lacks the political skills of her predecessor.

There are suggestions in Brazilian media that Mr Lula da Silva’s plan would be to run for presidency again in 2014.

Polls showed he would have probably won had he entered the 2010 race, but the Brazilian constitution allows for only two consecutive terms.

Mr Lula da Silva denies that this is his plan, but has refused to rule out running for office again.

In the few months after he leaves the presidency, he is expected to take a holiday while aides prepare the launch of the Lula Institute, an NGO whose role remains unclear.

So far, there are only speculations as to what Mr Lula da Silva’s actual intentions are. But it seems that one of the most popular statesmen in the world – still relatively young at 65 – will simply leave the stage while still at the top of his game.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Unite to survive, S Koreans told

Lee Myung-bak at the Demilitarised Zone on 26 Dec

Mr Lee said he had learned “valuable lessons” from the Yeonpyeong island shelling

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has told his nation it must unite in the face of military aggression from the North.

Mr Lee said in a national radio address that what was at stake was “the survival of this nation”.

He added: “If [we] are afraid of war, we can never prevent war.”

The Korean peninsula has been tense since the North shelled the Southern island of Yeonpyeong last month, killing four people.

On Sunday, it was announced that South Korean and Chinese defence ministers would meet in Beijing in February amid the rising tension.

In his broadcast on Monday, Mr Lee said: “We can’t afford to have division of you against me in the face of national security, because what’s at stake is our very lives and the survival of this nation.”

Mr Lee said divisions of opinion after the North’s alleged sinking of a Southern warship in March with the loss of 46 sailors had led to the North’s attack on Yeonpyeong island.

He said: “It is when we show solidarity as one that the North dares not challenge us. Their will to challenge breaks.”

South Korea has carried out a number of recent exercises

Mr Lee added: “We have clearly realised the fact that only strong counteractions to military provocations are able to deter war and safeguard peace.”

His government came in for some criticism at home as weak after the Yeonpyeong attack.

Mr Lee said he had learned “valuable lessons”.

Since the incident the South has replaced its defence minister and embarked on a series of military exercises while ratcheting up its rhetoric.

The North has not retaliated militarily but amid the rising tension last week vowed a “sacred war”.

Pyongyang denies the South’s claim that it sank the warship. It also says its shelling of the island was retaliation for a South Korean firing drill that dropped shells into North Korean territory.

At the end of his speech, Mr Lee said the South still wanted peaceful reunification with the North.

On Sunday, defence officials said that South Korea’s Defence Minister Kim Kwan-jin and his Chinese counterpart Liang Guanglie were organising talks in the Chinese capital in February, but added that details of the meeting agenda would be discussed later.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.