A YEAR on from the devastating Earthquake in Nepal members of Salisbury charity Serve On have returned to the country.

Four members of the team helped with search and rescue in Kathmandu after the quake hit and were the first British team with boots on the ground.

This time a team of five from the charity have been invited back to share their skills, experience and deliver a training programme in technical search and building search. They arrived in the country on Monday.

Serve On director Pete Old said: “Our charity has a history extending nearly two decades of responding to disasters and returning at a later stage to train local responders. We do this because we know more lives can be saved in the first 24 hours of a disaster by local people than by International search and rescue teams arriving in the following days, this way we can transform a relief-stage solution into a sustainable and permanent one.”

During their visit to Nepal Serve On will be discussing partnership working with the Ghurkha Welfare Trust, building on their unique Community Resilience model already in place in Salisbury and Portsmouth to build a team of highly trained volunteers who can respond in a disaster.

Whilst in Nepal Serve On have been asked by another UK charity, Team Rubicon, to support it’s completion of a project that HRH Prince Harry worked on.

Serve On director of operations, Dan Cooke, said: “We are really proud to have been asked by Team Rubicon to help them – in March they did a fantastic job in helping a group of determined villagers to rebuild a school that was destroyed by the earthquake.”

The team will deliver the training over 10 days before returning to the UK on May 25.

Since deploying a team to Nepal last year Serve On has also supported UK communities during the floods that battered Cumbria and Tadcaster.

For more information go to serveon.org.uk