First convoy update 12/12/09

Dear Friends,

Everything's going good so far. The atmosphere on the convoy is really good and positive, an amazing learning experience for all of us. We have a super team leader, and so our team has gelled really well. There's a massive cross-section of people on the convoy and in our team - we are the youngest, there are a few environmentalist / vegetarian / hippy dreaded types, several middle aged strict muslims, some older women and assorted others. Everyone is amazingly nice and theres lots of banter. If everyone could meet these people there would be no more racism.


Our problem so far is that we've pretty much been living a motorway / motorway services lifestyle. That means that most of the places don't have internet, and if they do we are only there long enough to fill up our tanks and go to the toilet... the good news is that from here onwards the people are much more receptive to what we're doing, which means we will (hopefully) get hospitality from locals, and gives us much more likelihood of getting online. We've been focussing on filming video, we plan to edit that tonight and tomorrow, and upload it tomorrow. It has short interviews with other people on the convoy, and basically a video diary of what has happened since we left. I've been mostly shooting film, but there are also some digital photos we can upload.


We are around 80 vehicles from Britain, around 250 by the time we get to Gaza. We are split up into teams, each team has a team leader, and we travel in the daytime with our individual teams, meeting up for the night all together. The driving has been quite chilled so far, our team leader Kieran is a genius, he does aid convoys for a living (also to Albania and Kosovo among others). As I said before, our team is incredibly diverse. Hopefully some of that comes across on the video. There have been a few conflicts and disputes in the convoy as a whole so far, but mostly everything has gone smoothly. Once we get into Turkey (there will be a big press conference on the 16th in Istanbul, which will be the most significant international press attention for the convoy so far) we will be driving with a police escort. Obviously the various countries we go through from then will treat us with varying degrees of welcoming and openness depending on their political alignments.

Thanks for all the support from back home, hopefully we will get the chance to write more soon.

Big loves,
Fred & Nora