Interview: Helen Gray, HALO Trust programme manager

By Craig Stennett
IT'S DEPLOYMENT day at The HALO Trust's compound in Zimpeto district, north Maputo, Mozambique – a day that's fondly described in Portuguese, the national tongue of Mozambique, as the day of confusão.

HALO is the world's oldest and largest landmine-clearance organisation and, today, 15 of the 26 highly specialised teams working in Maputo have just returned from their eight-day leave and are about to embark on three weeks living and working in one of the country's remaining 139 minefields.

The atmosphere is tense because these men and women work at what is widely acknowledged as one of the world's most dangerous jobs – de-miner.

It's still the rainy season, but today there's nothing but brilliant sunshine and an intense wilting African heat.

Helen Gray, a 30-year-old Scot, brought up on an East Linton farm and educated at George Watson's College in Edinburgh, now programme manager for The HALO Trust (it stands for Hazardous Area Life-Support Organisation) in Mozambique, pulls into the compound in her Nissan pick-up and surveys the scene.
What greets her is a blur of activity. Land Rovers and trucks are being refuelled, tents and sleeping bags are being loaded and stores are emptied of food and the essential de-mining kit the teams will need for the three weeks they'll spend in the field. After several hours they are ready for deployment throughout Maputo province and they leave the relative safety of HALO's compound.Gray has just returned from taking Susan Eckey, deputy director-general of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, and her accompanying delegation on a fact-finding mission in the HALO minefields. One of the two all-women teams HALO employs had extended their days in the field to accommodate the visit and will now redeploy later in the week.

HALO, a non-profit, non-governmental organisation, has its head office in Dumfries. Its singular mandate is to remove landmines and unexploded ordinance from the nine countries it operates in. It deployed its first de-mining team in Mozambique in February 1994, and has now declared the country's six northern provinces mine-free, leaving only the south to be made safe.After finishing her Bachelor of Science degree in biology and anthropology at Durham University, Gray worked as an interpreter for the Scottish Sea Bird Centre then as an expedition guide in Peru's threatened rainforests. Back in Britain she speculatively sent her CV to HALO. Her neighbour had told her about the organisation and she had already decided she wanted to work in a humanitarian field.Gray has worked for HALO since 2004 – when she was just 24 – doing her initial six-month training in Cabo Delgado, on the northern border of Mozambique, in the minefields laid by the Portuguese back in the early 1970s, when the country was fighting for its independence from Portugal.

She then worked in Angola, but returned to Mozambique in January 2008. In February 2009 she was asked to run the country's operations, with responsibility for its 370 staff and a budget of $3 million, just over half of what she needs if Mozambique is to hit its 2014 target to become completely mine-free."My job gives me tremendous satisfaction," she says. "It's brilliant to be able to send de-miners to an unsafe area to clear the land. That land then goes back to the local community, and you can return in a few months and see maize growing or the houses or schools that have been built there. The landmine problem has gone – forever. You don't get that sort of reward in many jobs."Learning to be a de-miner is painstaking work. Gray remembers her first day: "I really wanted to find a mine. For safety reasons, the drill we learn is systematic and repetitive. But, as I'd done all the training, I didn't want to find a metal signal with the detector and then spend 20 minutes carefully scraping and excavating my way towards a Coke can. I wanted to find a mine."
Gray has gone through all the appropriate levels of training: "To relate to the de-miners, paramedics or mechanics, you should have experienced their jobs yourself, first hand. You should have been through the training and worked on the ground yourself." She pauses and reminisces briefly about her life growing up on the farm in East Linton. "My upbringing has helped with the physically challenging work I do now and problem solving when you're out in the bush. I learnt from a young age to think on your feet."Returning to her first few days in the field, she adds: "Discovering my first mine was a reality check. People stand on these and they lose their legs, they lose their lives. Mines are particularly horrible, as they do not discriminate against old or young, male or female. They lie in the ground just waiting. I still to this day enter minefields and think, 'My God, what's the impact here? What's that village doing so close?'"

It's this level of commitment that allows Gray and her staff to tackle the mine clearance Mozambique so desperately needs. A country that, after 20 years of struggle with Portugal, faced an internal civil war between Frelimo (the Liberation Front of Mozambique) and Renamo (the Mozambican National Resistance party). An effective cease-fire came into force in October 1992, and it remains to this day. Its legacy, however, was 900,000 deaths, five million displaced people and an estimated 200,000 landmines deployed by all sides.HALO is probably most famously linked in the public's collective memory with an iconic image of the late Princess Diana in a minefield. In January 1997, the last year of her life, Diana visited a HALO minefield on the outskirts of Huambo City in Angola. The images were seen worldwide and have been attributed with influencing the signing of the Ottawa Treaty, which created an international ban on the use of anti-personnel mines and the need for their removal from the 70 countries they still present a danger to.

"Diana was visiting the International Committee of the Red Cross in Angola when they suggested to her that she should visit one of our minefields," Gray recalls. "The princess brought fantastic visibility to the need for humanitarian mine clearance and the issue of mine use."Gray accompanied Prince Harry last year to the once densely laid minefield around the Cahora Bassa hydroelectric dam. She had led the team which removed some mines from this area. The community of Nhanchenge was divided by an 11km minefield – so far HALO has destroyed 6,500 mines and the work is ongoing, reuniting villages that were literally cut in two by the deployment of mines.
"Prince Harry visited HALO in Tete province for two days," she says. "We showed him the work HALO had undertaken to clear this incredibly dense mine line. He met the local community and victims of the mines and showed the same humanity and empathy his late mother was renowned for."Leaving the Zimpeta compound in the pick-up, Gray makes her way out of Maputo, along cratered roads bent on the destruction of the Nissan's suspension and through dense traffic, which adheres to an alternative highway code to that practised in Scotland. Drivers need good visual awareness and nerves of steel – qualities she has in abundance. "It's lucky I've been driving tractors at home since I was young," she chuckles, as we swerve around another oncoming minivan full of commuters naturally travelling the wrong way up the same road.

Eventually we join the well-maintained NRD EN4 highway west of Maputo, following the trail the de-mining teams took the day before. Driving towards the South African border, we arrive at one of the Equipa de Meninas minefields or "girls' sections". They are working at the Damo minefield, the old electricity pylon route, its wooden structures long since crumbled into the earth.The ten-strong team has been awake since 4.30am – work starts at first light at 6am, finishing at 1pm. The working day is dictated by the need to avoid the worst of the heat. Nevertheless, temperatures can get into the 30s Centigrade, producing a punishing environment in which it's hard to maintain physical strength and concentration – both crucial for de-miners – along with the strict adherence to the operating procedures they must follow to stay alive. The women wear ballistic visors and Kevlar jackets and systematically cover the land inch by inch with metal detectors. Since lapses in concentration could be fatal, they take a ten-minute break every hour.The first women's section was formed within HALO in 2007.

"The perception in Mozambique was that de-mining was a job done by men," says Gray. "When we were recruiting, we clearly stated that applications were welcome from both women and men, and we found that many women applied. They've done incredibly well and some have been promoted through our system."Twenty eight-year-old supervisor Domingas Lacrimosa Lina Dias, a tall, purposeful woman, says: "We work here to rid our country of mines. I feel proud as a woman to be doing this job. It was seen as men's work, but I am proving otherwise."Gray's mobile is ringing. When she answers she is informed that they're ready for the destruction of a landmine at Mubobo minefield a mile or so away. Mubobo is the most heavily mined area remaining in Maputo province. The Frelimo government laid it during the civil war to impede sabotage of the vital pylons providing the capital with its electricity.Twenty two-year-old section supervisor Onorio Manuel meets Gray on our arrival. From the safety of the designated control point, he formally briefs her on the situation in the minefield. After safety equipment has been put on, Manuel primes a pentolite explosive charge he needs to destroy a Soviet PMN mine they've detected near one of the pylons.

"It is HALO policy to destroy every mine and each piece of unexploded ordinance it discovers. Then it is irretrievably gone, for all time," Gray explains as she monitors Manuel's progress with the explosive charge. The two walk slowly up into the minefield, the safe zones clearly marked by red-tipped sticks placed in the ground. "If you're inside these markers, you're safe," says Gray.They solemnly pass the skeletal remains of two individuals whose deaths in this minefield passed without ceremony long ago. "They were probably trying to steal metal, stepped on one of the anti-personnel mines planted here, but managed to crawl off – only to die here alone. "They're not from the local community so their bodies haven't been claimed. We're deciding with the locals what we should do with them once we've completely cleared this area."A whistle blows, giving the signal for the whole team to withdraw to a safe distance as Manuel lays the charge. "You always do this part alone," Gray explains. "One man, one risk." A fuse that will burn for five minutes has been chosen, ample time for Onario to join Gray 100 yards from the blast zone – the distance deemed safe for this type of landmine.

The minutes are counted down, then the seconds as the detonation time approaches. Out of direct line of sight, it's the noise of the bang that hits you first, followed by a mushroom black plume of smoke pushing its way up into the sky as the explosive charge and the mine itself are destroyed. Then it's all over – and in Maputo province there's one less mine to worry about.