What a strange year. It was a year of isolation. A year where we were distracted from familiar things, everyday habits, our normal movements, our friends and even family. It has been a year of reflection about what is really necessary and important.

Anais is a Disaster and Emergency Response Team (DART) member and after being in lockdown in London for a while, she began to rethink how she could be spending her time during a global pandemic. In this post, Anais answers some interview questions about how she became a DART member and what’s motivated her to join GAiN’s response to the Corona Virus in Camp Moria.

This year GAiN UK is turning 5 and in celebration of this milestone, we have held an Online Network Gathering and Celebration Event! Thank you to everyone who attended these events. In this post Sarah Patel has summarised some of what GAiN UK has achieved over the past 5 years. This page will give you the opportunity to respond to our Celebration Event and hear a little about what the next fears year have in store.

As we prepared ourselves for what the press is calling “the hell of Moria”, we became more fearful as we read articles, books, saw photos and watched footage of the camp. We prayed for courage, for protection, for provision, for wisdom, for compassion….

We arrived in Lesbos to meet our team and get some informative, relevant and insightful training: a great start to meet such special, dedicated, wise people and feel safe together.

Back in October, a joint GAiN team from the UK and Netherlands went to volunteer at Moria, the new arrivals refugee camp in Lesvos, Greece. What followed was a series of events that were neither planned nor expected, but resulted in another team returning in February to assemble large tents donated from the Mission Impossible set!

I’ll admit it. I’m one of the millions who binge-watched the new Marie Kondo Netflix series ‘Tidying Up’ over the holidays. It hit me at just the right time. My house was filled with clutter, disused baby toys, bills from 2009 and clothes that no longer fit. I’d been itching to start 2019 with a fresh mind and a clean house, and Marie Kondo and her patented joy-sparking and folding methods were just the push I needed to get started.