How Well Can Your Family Handle An Emergency

One man was lost for several days on the Bibulmin Track. He didn't know how to find his direction, and nearly died of thirst. All he needed to do was travel towards the main road, either towards or away from the sun as the case might be. But he didn't know how to.

Another boy lost his life recently in the bush, and hasn't been found yet. His mother explained that she did everything for him, so he wouldn't know how to drink out of a stream, and there was nobody to hand him a glass of water in the bush.

Man is better than the other animals because of his brain. If we don't use our brains we lose our superiority. Healthy kids love a constant round of activities because it stimulates that human brain. Each new pursuit will build new skills and ways of thinking.

If you spend all your time in front of the TV the kids will have to find projects of their own. Many kids now spend hours playing computer games each day. What manual skills are they building? How to push some buttons!

Have ongoing activities including planning for holidays, so that the family can experience budgeting, arts and crafts, gardening, cooking, keeping and butchering animals or just fishing and cleaning the fish. Don't let your family pursuits be so few and uneducational that your children could end up dieing within sight of food and water because they don't know how to unzip a banana, or clarify a mud puddle.

How can your family become more versatile? Practice learning new things. The more you learn the faster you can learn, and the more options you will have in an emergency.

Our research was brought to a standstill by a frozen water-pipe. The rules said that the gardener had to dig up the pipe then the plumber had to fix the pipe. But the gardener was on holiday. So the boss and I dug a trench to uncover the pipe, replaced the broken section, and covered everything up again, even shovelling snow back on top for extra insulation. Neither of the trade unions ever knew that we had avoided a two-week delay by doing their work ourselves.

If your family has lots of projects you are preparing them to be versatile. Needlework will help a newbie surgeon. Cookery will help a chemistry student. If they learn to replace tap washers they won't be at the mercy of plumbers. You never know when painting, gardening, simple mechanics or mending a puncture will be important to them. In fact anything they learn can have an unexpected value in the future.

Products of the kids construction will have to be proudly displayed. Visitors won't despise the display, or if they do, they are not the kind of people you want to know.

And yes(!) boys need to learn to cook and sew. Their army mates will stop laughing when the have to rely on their cooking. If they allowed a friend to bleed to death out in the bush because they couldn't thread a needle to sew them up imagine how they would feel.

A young lady might just have to stand and look helpless to get the boys clustering round to fix her car, do the gardening, clean the gutters, kill the hens, fix the door lock etc. but if she doesn't know how to do it herself, will she have as many helpers when she is 50 years old?

Vegetating before a TV is OK until civilization changes, perhaps tomorrow. If global warming floods coastal cities what would your family do?

Over and over again the author is thankful for parents that showed us family pursuits that helped us to be self-reliant and versatile and that taught us not to rely on doctors for family health.