Be Prepared. If ever a motto was needed in this age of couch potatoedness (I just made this one up!), it has to be the Scout motto. Humanity has advanced so fast over the past five or six decades and has become very dependant on the latest of technologies and gadgets to make our lives even easier than it already is. There’s almost an App for everything! The more advanced (read higher standard of living) the society we live in is, the more complacent we become. We take things for granted, things that our great grandparents couldn’t even dream of, let alone experience.
Skills we learned and developed over thousands of years—turning them into instincts to live by, have now become skills that, we hope, our kids might learn in summer camps, only for some of them to forget after the first stint in front of the television.
Take knots for example, a long time ago most people knew how to tie the most common knots and hitches as they were crucial in their daily lives, and the more their profession relied on them the more advanced their skills and their knots were. Sailors were at the top of the food chain in this territory, and they probably still are. Nowadays, only the most avid of outdoors enthusiasts would bother learning the different knots and hitches there are. That’s just one example among many.
I am not a survival expert, but on January 28, 2011, my family and myself went to bed to the tunes of gunfire. It was the third day of the Jan25 revolution in Egypt, and things had taken a turn to the worst. Not only did we have to contend with anarchy, and jails that were deliberately opened by the authorities to let the most hardened criminals out – the idea was for them to terrorize the streets and make the people forget about rebellion – but we were also cut off from the world, since the authorities shut down all internet and mobile communications.
That’s when we turned to survival tactics, and once the internet came back online, the first thing we searched for was information on what to do in emergencies. Believe it or not, TV shows like Survivorman and Man Vs. Wild aided in that information as well. Since then we’ve been collecting survival and preparedness material.
In this series, we will attempt to collect and gather as much of the best survival information and tactics, so that perhaps whenever you are caught in one of these situation, you would know the right thing to do and when to do it, and in the process help save a life… Deserts, mountains, oceans and rivers, forests, urban environments, extreme cold, anarchy, and natural disasters, anything can happen at any time, the question is, will we be ready.
