The Achiever

Most people would think giving up a well paid job as a scientist for the MoD and working part-time in a bookshop, whilst doing charity work in the midst of a recession, is crazy. But that’s exactly what Miss Jones has done. She has taken a leap of faith that few of us are willing to make and now she is reaping the rewards. I met Miss Jones on her return from L’Aquila, the Italian town hit by a massive earthquake earlier this month. My first thought was that the photographs of Miss Jones in her Shelterbox T-Shirt, standing by a recently constructed tent in the village of Assergi, don’t do her justice. But then the slim 36-year-old had travelled for 36 hours to reach the quake hit region as a member of the Shelterbox Response Team. As the team arrived in the shadow of Gran Sasso d’Italia (the Great Stone of Italy), snow-capped mountains and green fields masked the destruction. In the village of Assergi, 20kms from the epicentre of the earthquake in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, hundreds of families began to wake up and get out of their cars. The quake, which killed nearly 300 people, injured thousands and left hundreds of families homeless, caused wide spread devastation in the early hours of Monday April 6. Measuring 6.3 on the Richter Scale the earthquake and subsequent nightly aftershocks had turned the town of L’Aquila into a river of rubble. Villagers living in Assergi had been told to leave their unstable homes. Seeking shelter in nearby fields they had abandoned houses with cracks in the walls and debris from upstairs bedrooms weighing down on kitchen tables below. Miss Jones trained as a response team member with Shelterbox, a Cornish based charity which provides boxes including 10 man tents, cooking utensils, tool kits and blankets to people in disaster struck areas. It was her first deployment. The well-travelled, Italian speaking scientist who works part-time in Waterstones, had shaken free of her previous office based existence.