Guy Willoughby is standing 100 yards from Mozambique’s border with Zimbabwe, contemplating his latest challenge — clearing a minefield laid by the Rhodesian army in the 1970s.
It is hot, dusty, tiring and dangerous work, but it is what the Halo Trust, which Mr Willoughby founded more than 20 years ago, does best.
Last Monday, Prince Harry became the latest member of the Royal Family to endorse the trust’s work, crossing a minefield in body armour, just as his mother Princess Diana did 13 years earlier.
Mr Willoughby, 50, had the idea for the trust in 1988. Having served as a junior officer in the Coldstream Guards, he was in Africa, preparing a report for the European Commission on the famine relief effort.
Mr Willoughby, who was born into a military family in Yorkshire, says: “I saw the effects of landmines and, at the same time, the Russians were just announcing that they were withdrawing from Afghanistan. We knew about the five million Afghan refugees who needed to go home and the problem with the Russian mines there.”
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He was no expert — not having dealt with mines during his military career — but felt that there was a straightforward solution to the problem. “Because landmines are mass-produced, their mechanisms are very simple. I felt that if one could set up an organisation with a lot of de-miners and local people trained to clear mines, they could make a big impact.”
Such thinking remains the ethos of the trust, which now employs almost 8,000 full-time mine clearers, mainly drawn from local populations, in ten countries. As of May this year — the charity’s 22nd anniversary — the trust has destroyed 1.3 million landmines, 12 million pieces of large calibre ordnance and 50 million bullets.
Halo (short for Hazardous Areas Life support Organisation) has cleared more than 6,800 minefields and made 62,373 acres safe from landmines. “Landmines do some things which are terrible, and blow people up, but they don’t breed. When they’re gone, that’s it,” Mr Willoughby says.
The trust pays staff above average wages — usually more than the local policeman takes home. It attracts men and women, although not in Afghanistan, aged between 20 and 35. Many are former soldiers. Because the trust has been in Afghanistan since 1988, through various regime changes, it has the acceptance of the Taleban, who leave it alone to work.
Workers are insured by Lloyds of London and supplied with personal protective equipment and a handheld mine detector about the size of a squash racquet. They are not trained to destroy mines — instead alerting their team leader when they locate the devices.
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They work on their hands and knees for 50 minutes when the weather is not too hot — 30 minutes when it is — and then take a ten-minute break. The day begins at dawn, which is currently about 6.30am in Mozambique, and ends between 1pm and 2pm. The restricted hours mean that staff do not lose their concentration. If they focus, says Mr Willoughby, the job is no more dangerous than flying a helicopter. Since the trust began, it has lost 32 staff, but in terms of workplace accidents, Mr Willoughby says it is rated safer than working in agriculture in Scotland or in the recycling industry.
“Clearing mines is like driving down a motorway contraflow in the rain, at night,” he adds. “If you concentrate, it’s completely safe. If you don’t concentrate, you have a really bad accident.”
Halo’s profile was raised worldwide in 1997 when Princess Diana was photgraphed walking though a cleared minefield wearing the charity’s protective clothing. The strikingly similar images of her youngest son from last week gave the charity a similar boost. Mr Willoughby says that the prince hopes to travel with the trust to Angola — which has the most mines in Africa.
“I think he has an affinity with Africa and Africans. He got on very well with all our staff, from the de-mining lad aged 20 to the senior managers aged 40 and he was completely relaxed and happy in dealing with them.”
Mr Willoughby added that Prince Harry wanted to see the trust’s work at first hand after witnessing the effects of explosive devices on his comrades in the Armed Forces.
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Despite Halo’s success, Mr Willoughby wishes it could be bigger. “We have 400 in Mozambique, we should have 800. Where we have 1,200 Afghans, we should have 2,000,” he says.
• It costs up to £10 for the Halo Trust to clear each mine. The charity has a text donation scheme which gives it £3 a time. For further information, visit www. halotrust.org