In India Reena had succeeded in making an appointment to see a senior minister who had access to sport funding. She arrived expecting to meet the minister but was instead given a ticket and asked to wait along with dozens of other petitioners. When it was finally her turn, Reena was shown into a room where she assumed she would meet the minister in person but in fact found only a phone on a desk. The minister’s PA was on the line. Reena told him about the expedition and later related the conversation to me. ‘He was very enthusiastic and was sure the minister could provide some funding and he said that only a small commission would be necessary.’
‘Commission?’ I repeated suspiciously.
‘Yes. In India, if you want a national award, you pay a commission and you get it.’
It took me a moment to realise that we were talking about bribery. Despite Reena insisting that ‘commissions’ were inevitable in India, I was adamant that we would find another way.
Meanwhile, Era in Brunei had finally received the precious letter from the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport giving her permission to raise funds for the expedition but – as if the financial crisis wasn’t enough of a handicap – now the world was gripped by the H1N1 virus scare. Some 66 people in Brunei had fallen ill, and the authorities responded by stopping all gatherings including sporting events and fundraisers. Era’s planned sports tournament fundraisers would be cancelled on both counts. Even worse, no one was sure how long the ban on public gatherings would last.
Kim in Jamaica had decided to hold another fundraiser called Frozen. After the disastrous Cold Front event in which Kim had actually lost money, I was cautious as she talked through her plans but she assured me that this time it was going to be a success. I wasn’t convinced but it was clear that she wasn’t going to change her mind.
In order to secure aircraft support for the expedition we had to pay the logistics company, Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions (ALE), by a deadline that was fast approaching. We planned to depart for Antarctica in November and it was already August when I received a promising call from Sophia. A distributor of computer software in Singapore had mentioned that his parent company, Kaspersky Lab, were looking for interesting projects to sponsor. Kaspersky Lab is an Internet security firm led by Eugene Kaspersky, an expert pioneer in anti-virus software. It is now the largest privately owned company in the world and trades all over the globe, from the Americas to Japan. Our contact worked within Kaspersky Lab Asia. With India, Singapore, Brunei and New Zealand all falling within their sales region and represented on the expedition team, we had a lot to offer them in return for financial support.
Within a week of submitting a sponsorship proposal I received a call from a woman called Suk Ling in Malaysia. As she explained that she was the director of South East Asia for Kaspersky Lab I could feel my heart starting to thud in my chest. The fact that someone so senior had personally called the expedition indicated that they were taking our proposal seriously and I realised that this could be the most critical phone call of the entire project. This was my chance to sell the expedition, to make sure that Suk Ling would report back that we were the ideal venture for Kaspersky Lab. My heart thumped louder as she explained that Kaspersky Lab was only interested in being an exclusive title sponsor. I felt the pressure of the hopes and dreams of eight women, my team, all hanging on my performance at that very moment. This was it, every word had to count. We talked about departure dates and logistics, media coverage and our planned training in New Zealand. Suk Ling asked if the team could travel to Singapore for a press conference (I agreed immediately, visas permitting). As the questions became more detailed my hopes rose even higher. Suk Ling asked me to prepare payment schedules and draft contracts for her and finally we spoke about the name. Could the expedition be renamed to include Kaspersky Lab in the title? I agreed immediately and we played around with some options on the phone, such as the Kaspersky Lab Commonwealth Expedition or the Kaspersky Lab Women’s Antarctic Expedition. After an hour or so Suk Ling seemed satisfied that she had the information she needed. ‘We will revert to you the final decision by this Friday,’ she promised.
I put down the phone and pressed my hands onto on the table. My heart was still thumping and I was so full of excitement that I wanted to leap around the room, to yell from the rooftops but no, not yet: until I had a signature on a contract I would not allow myself to believe it was real. The conversation with Suk Ling had been so positive and so specific that it was almost impossible to think that Kaspersky Lab would decline to be our sponsor but still, I had been to the brink of sponsorship with other companies and other expeditions in the past, only to be let down way past the last minute. I could not, and would not, let myself get caught out like that again.
Waiting for the decision from Kaspersky Lab, I sat in my office hardly daring to breathe. I tried to get on with other work but ended up literally staring at my computer screen waiting for a response to arrive. As the week passed I received several emails from Suk Ling to clarify minor details. Replying to each email was agony. I felt as if each of my replies was a potential deal-breaker, as if one misplaced word, one badly phrased sentiment could ruin everything. This had been our best lead and it was also our last chance. The probability of getting this close to full sponsorship again before our payment deadline in a fortnight was less than zero. Everything depended on securing sponsorship from Kaspersky Lab.
Friday arrived and I was nearly sick with anxiety when I opened up my mailbox to find an email from Suk Ling. It said simply, ‘Great news. My management has approved the sponsorship.’
I wrote to the girls immediately. I could imagine the yelps and sighs of relief around the world as one by one the girls opened the email and replied – each with more imaginative use of exclamation marks than the last.
‘YIPPPEEEEE!!!!!! Finally, I can breathe a little easier now!’ wrote Sophia.
‘Absolutely UNBELIEVABLE news!!!!!!!!!!!!!’ emailed Steph.
‘WOW WOW WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!’ typed Reena, ‘I am so happy!!!’
‘All right, now I know my Lord God is faithful to his children! Our tears, sweat, hard work and perseverance will not be in vain,’ wrote Barbara to the team. She added, ‘Present status: being kicked out of Internet cafe for uncontrollable screaming!’
True to form, it was a few days later before Kim picked up the email, ‘I am still jumping around,’ she said. ‘Have to digest it.’
Once the celebrations were over there wasn’t a lot of time to dwell on our triumph. In three weeks’ time we were all due to meet in New Zealand. Charmaine had taken the lead on the arrangements but hadn’t provided many details. As much as I trusted her to do a good job, I needed to know where we would be staying and what kit she had managed to source locally. I was surprised at her lack of communication; it was almost as if she was deliberately keeping me in the dark. I sensed trouble but consigned the problem to my subconscious to mull over. Barbara was a more pressing priority. For the past month I had been nagging her daily about her visa for New Zealand in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the fiasco before Norway but communication was scarce. She avoided talking to me on Skype and her emails were vague. I started to recognise the signs: something was wrong. Sure enough, three weeks before our departure I received an email from Barbara informing me that she wouldn’t be coming to New Zealand.
I may not be able to attend the NZ training event as planned, because I won’t be able to afford to at the time... but I’m trying to look at the bigger picture. I NEED to make it to Antarctica, even if it means sacrificing an important event such as New Zealand. I just feel that with the time left, I would be better off continuing to fight for the money to get to Antarctica… whatever it takes…
I had explained to Barbara so many times that we were raising funds as a team, that she didn’t have to find all the money herself. I understood her pride and the fact that she didn’t want to be subsidised but the truth was that we were all being subsidised one way or another. As long as she was worki
ng as hard as everyone else to find support (which I believe she was), the expedition funds were there for her to use. The expedition could buy her ticket to New Zealand but the expedition couldn’t magic up a visa – that was down to Barbara and yet again she had left it too late.
Skipping the training in New Zealand wasn’t an option. Barbara had taken on all the new skills in Norway easily but all the women still needed to work on a number of routines before they were ready for Antarctica. I wondered if perhaps I had been too gentle with the team; perhaps I hadn’t imparted properly the dangers of the South. The team needed to be well trained, otherwise they would get injured. Frostbite can happen in a second and if our drills were bad we would end up spending more time than necessary exposed to the cold.
Once again I found myself on the phone to various embassies and high commissions sorting out Barbara’s visa. As I listened to holding music on expensive overseas calls I wondered despairingly how I had allowed myself to get in this position again. Had I learnt nothing? Sometimes I worried that I treated the girls like children, while at other times I kicked myself for not holding their hands tighter, for assuming levels of responsibility and understanding that simply weren’t there. I didn’t blame the team; I was the one who had told them they were capable of this and so I was the one who had to accept the consequences of that belief.
I arrived in New Zealand in September expecting winter, but Christchurch looked suspiciously spring-like as I walked towards the main square. The team were due to fly in at various times throughout the day but Barbara, who had just received her visa, now needed a flight. I walked into a big, empty travel agent and explained my problem to the two women sitting in front of their computers. They looked increasingly intrigued the more I explained about my problem and they were soon tapping away furiously at their keyboards, occasionally pausing to talk to each other in strange flight-code language. The first available flight had Barbara arriving just two days before we were all due to leave New Zealand. There was no point asking her to travel halfway across the world, at great expense, for two days. The two travel agents refused to give up but after three hours I called a halt to the search. I had to go and meet the rest of the team in the airport and couldn’t leave it any longer.
We drove south in a convoy of three vehicles from Christchurch to our new base, which Charmaine had arranged for us in a small hamlet called Twizel. The girls were all thrilled to see each other again and as they filled the car with excited chatter I stared out of the window at the passing landscape and thought about Barbara and the consequences of this latest twist. Barbara would not be coming to New Zealand and without this additional training there was no way she could come to Antarctica. That left me with two options; to accept that we would have no Ghanaian on the team, or to find a way to get Barbara the training she needed.
I thought about a team without Barbara. Without her we still had a multi-cultural commonwealth team but it was the fact that we would lose Barbara herself that seemed wrong. She and I had both worked so hard to get this far that I felt a stubborn refusal to let her go and I think this was because, in many ways, Barbara represented exactly the sort of person that this expedition was all about: a woman who was capable of great things but who had never really been given a chance to prove herself. In Norway she had shown that she would not have a problem getting to the South Pole given the right training and preparation but now it seemed that she would not get the opportunity, due to money and pride. Despite the bleak outlook and the fact that all my common sense screamed at me to draw a line underneath the issue, I wasn’t ready to give up on her yet.
Then there was Helen to consider. She had been dealing admirably with the awkward reserve role but I knew she was finding the uncertainty hard. Helen had fulfilled her side of the bargain: she had trained as hard as the others; she had spent as much time, if not more, as the others helping me with the logistics and planning; and she had shown just as much commitment. All of this was in return for the genuine possibility that she might be called on to come to Antarctica. Was it unfair that I was going to such great lengths to ensure that the original members of the team made it to Antarctica and, in doing so, preventing her from coming?
Our base in Twizel was a small wooden cottage painted pastel pink that belonged to a friend of Charmaine’s. We spread out over the long, grassy yard at the back of the cottage to take a look at all our gear. A British clothing company, Montane, had agreed to provide all the layers we would need for Antarctica and they had sent sample clothing to New Zealand for our training so that we could decide what we wanted and let them know which sizes we would need. Helen and I had brought all the clothing out with us as luggage on the flight from the UK and had managed – through well-practised subterfuge – to avoid any excess baggage charges. Now that I saw it all laid out, it seemed incredible that we had got away with it.
As well as trying out the clothing, we also needed to try out the food. During the expedition our main feed of the day would be a dehydrated meal prepared by adding boiling water to a bag and allowing the contents to stew. As a Muslim, Era could only eat halal meat (meat from animals that have been slaughtered in a way prescribed by her religion) but I hadn’t been able to find a supplier of expedition meals that were halal. To avoid one team member having separate food from everyone else (which would be a logistical nightmare) our only option was to be a vegetarian expedition, despite the impact this would have on our nutritional intake. I prepared a sample of each vegetarian variety of the expedition meals I had sourced so that the team could try them. The response was generally underwhelming. ‘It looks like the contents of a baby’s nappy,’ Kim commented.
‘Mine smells like a baby’s nappy,’ Steph replied.
‘Well, it’s better than the green one that looks like snot,’ said Helen.
‘I think it’s supposed to be fish,’ remarked Sophia.
As the meals were discarded, unfinished, it was clear that I was going to have to find an alternative.
The plan for the next week was to leave the cottage and drive even further south to the Pisa Range near Wanaka for a training expedition. The range was home to New Zealand’s one and only cross-country ski park which would make an ideal base to use as a start and end point for our mini-expedition. It was a relief as we zigzagged up the steep mountain road toward the park to finally see some snow – the first we’d found since arriving. It was the end of the winter season and the snow had retreated to the very tops of the ranges but even up here it was patchy, revealing large areas of rock and soil. I looked over the maps with Charmaine. Considering the snow conditions we would have to make our way up onto the higher reaches of the range along one of several wide ridges that led onto a narrow plateau at the top. We agreed on the plan but Charmaine was cagey, as she had been since I’d arrived. She seemed to be drawing away from the team, always doing her own thing rather than joining in with everyone else. During our time at the cottage Charmaine was repeatedly the last to arrive at team meetings, excusing herself to attend to something else or typing away on a laptop during team discussions. There was something more that was harder to define, something I found uncomfortable about her comments to the team, particularly about decisions I had made on anything from gear choices to aspects of our sponsorship. I wondered if I was being paranoid but it increasingly felt like an insidious, perhaps even unintentional, undermining of my role as leader.
As the team set up our first camp in a snow-filled gully just out of sight of the cross-country ski lodge I took the opportunity to talk to Charmaine. We wandered away from the tents, plodding through the deep snow, until we were out of earshot. I got to the point quickly. ‘Charmaine, the girls look up to you and it’s a huge boost for me to have someone with your experience on the team but we need to work together – otherwise it just causes confusion. This team needs clear and uncomplicated leadership; it gives them confidence.’
Charmaine listened seriously but answered casually, ‘Felicity, you are the leader
. I understand that and have absolutely no problem with you being the leader. But you don’t include anyone in your decisions. The team aren’t stupid, their opinions count.’
Her feedback surprised me. I felt that I had gone out of my way to elicit opinions from the others and one of my biggest frustrations was the fact that no one seemed to respond. I listened carefully to Charmaine’s comments but couldn’t help thinking that she was talking more about her own feelings than those of anyone else on the team. Despite my efforts to make her feel valued, Charmaine clearly felt that she wasn’t being included in the decision-making process. I promised to change that but still needed her to see that she needed to change too – she needed to communicate with me better.
‘I’m not on an ego trip, Charmaine. If you don’t like the way I’m doing something you need to talk to me – but privately rather than bringing it up in front of the team.’
Despite the awkwardness of what was said, it was a friendly conversation and as we walked back to the tents I felt like the air had been cleared. It was only as I felt the relief that I realised how much the friction had been bothering me.
It was a tough first day. We spent the morning doing small local circuits to get re-acquainted with the skis before adding sledges to the mix. Each member of the team pulled their own sledge, just as they would in Antarctica. The sledges weren’t heavy but the terrain was more challenging than I would have liked for our first day, forcing the girls to sidestep up icy slopes, traverse around awkward hills and make some memorable descents. Eventually we reached the foot of the ridge that would take us up onto the plateau and we camped for the night with an incredible view across the Southern Alps.
Starting early in the morning the route forward looked deceptively simple but by midday we found ourselves halfway up an increasingly icy and treacherous slope. The gradient to our right had become gradually steeper and I was worried that if someone fell they would fall all the way to the valley floor. However, the consequence of turning around would be that we were confined to the valleys below for the rest of our training. Remembering Charmaine’s comments the previous evening, I gathered the group together on a rare flat patch on the icy slope and outlined our situation, as I saw it, asking the group for their opinion on what we should do. There was an awkward silence. I resisted the urge to fill the gap and waited.
Call of the White Page 13