Working in Antarctica takes a certain type of person - someone who can adapt to any situation, be inventive, able to use what is at hand when you don’t have the right gear and make the best of a bad situation. Most importantly, you need to be able to work as part of a team. This best describes us here at a little research station on the cold and barren continent deep in the south called Casey.
It all started a few weeks ago after summer ended and reality started to kick in — there was only 21 of us left for a long winter, all blokes and no females! If that wasn’t bad enough, we stumbled across the fact that we were running low on soap and there would be no more supplies sent in for another seven months.
At the next station meeting the subject of the soap shortage came up and we felt sorrow for the incoming summerers arriving to a bunch of scruffy, stinky winterers. Suddenly, our tears of sadness turned to tears of joy as a few brave volunteers came forth with the promise of a solution to our stinky problem.
Over the next couple of days, the small group of heroes spent day and night scanning the internet for methods and recipes to make soap. Then came the hard part: trying to locate the ingredients. Oil was first on the list which was starting to seem harder and harder get hold of as the chef didn’t want to part with any of his. In the end, coconut oil, grapeseed oil and French lavender oil were sourced from the masseuse. Then came the big day, the day of the cook-up. The batch cooking went off without a hitch and a couple of weeks later, when the soap had dried, it was time to test the final product. It was a success with the whole station of blokes now smelling of lavender!
So now when the next lot of summerers fly in they will be eternally grateful to the group of heroes that spent so much of their spare time making us all smell nice.
Ben H.