Doing the Dirty Work - The Facilities Family

[Content warning: bin juice 🗑️ and brown waste 💩]

There is a team that is working at EIJ2024 that, if they do their jobs right, you hardly notice they exist. Their aim is to fly under the radar, keep things running, be the legs of the swan paddling frantically beneath the serenity. However, if this team were to miraculously disappear, the jamboree would certainly grind to a messy, smelly halt practically within minutes.

The facilities team work (literally) day and night to keep the Jamboree running smoothly, and that ‘running smoothly’ encompasses an incomprehensible range of jobs from driving tractors, to mending broken equipment to restocking toilet roll. The sheer scale of the logistics to turn the field that we call home for the week into the small town that is Essex International Jamboree is simply mind boggling.

The site begins as a field. A plain, blank, farmers field. No pipes, no cables, not a thing to be had apart from the birds, insects and grass. When we are not here, the field plays host to crops and the usual farm activities. Then once every four years, it is transformed and hosts up to 10,000 people (bigger than a lot of the towns our participants and staff live in!) for 7 days. The only thing that stays on site is the tanks that sit beneath the ground, known affectionately as ‘the pits’. They are known as ‘the pits’ by the wet waste team or (as you will have seen on their vehicles) Brown Squadron. Brown Squadron are a dedicated and close-knit group whose job (that they do for free like the rest of the staff!) is quite simply to come and pump out all of the wet waste. Anything you put down a toilet, sink or elsan point, will be handled by Brown Squadron. The question that was absolutely burning on my lips to ask was why?? Why on earth would you choose to do a job like this UNPAID at an event where you could be crafting, shooting, writing articles about poo for the news, or simply ANYTHING else?? The general consensus from Beth (Deputy Head of Department for Wet Waste and Facilities) and Debbie (Wet Waste and Facilities Team Member) was two-fold, for Debbie the choice was clear, “I get to drive a tractor! And I don’t get to do this sort of thing for my everyday job so it’s good to do something different and I REALLY don’t like the smell of dry waste.”

“Dry waste is the WORST! Dry waste is nominally dry because it goes in bin bags, but we say that dry waste is worse because I will take poo over bin juice any day of the week! I will take shower water over milk slops that have been sat in the sun mingling with last night’s leftovers 7 days out of 7 thank you very much!” Beth agreed wholeheartedly.

However this still begs the question, why deal with waste at all?? Wet or dry?? Especially as a volunteer! The more I spoke to Beth and Debbie, it became clear that a massive draw for them both is the people. Simply put, the facilities team is like a family, an incredibly close knit, hard-working family. “For me, I keep coming back because I absolutely love the people that we work with. I’m trying really hard not to cry this week! These are some of the most wonderful human beings on the planet and that’s why we keep coming back and doing the same job,”, Beth told me with proof of her words being in the fact she and Debbie have come back to do the same job for every Essex International Jamboree since 2008. The way they speak about their colleagues and the team in general really shows how tight knit this team really is, Debbie pointed out. Some of the bits we do comes with inherent risk, "so you have to be able to trust the other members of your team. We can communicate quite easily through sign language because she’s in the cab and I’m at the back of the tank. We know exactly what each other means because we’ve built that relationship and friendship for years.” Steve, a Facilities Operative at the Jamboree and a carpenter in ‘real life’, had a slightly more glitzy route into the job by way of the Southend Gang Show, “When I first started going, was my wife was in it and then at clear up because I joined in they knew I was more willing to do it and it just carried on from there and today is my 20 year anniversary!”

“It is absolute trust; we talk about driver and operator and it is ABSOLUTE trust. Things can go wrong! They don’t, we work very hard to make sure that we are safe as possible and it’s that trust that I think binds us together,”, Beth added underlining just how valuable and highly skilled this team is. Beth and Debbie between them are qualified to drive a tractors, forklifts and telehandlers which takes no small amount of training!

If you are wondering what happens when you flush a toilet at the jamboree, essentially the process is it goes to a holding tank either in the ground or in the base of a portaloo (affectionately known as ‘Turdis-es’) gets sucked out by Brown Squadron, moved to a bigger holding tank and then collected by a sewage company. However when you dig into the team of people that do this, it is so much more than just driving tractors and sucking out poo. There are multiple generations of families that work on these teams together, fathers, sons, cousins, brothers and so many friends. Those that come into the team through family are called ‘legacies’ and there are multiple families that work together on the facilities team. One of the more recent additions as a ‘legacy’ being Josh who was crowned the King of Poo with the exclusive poo emoji hat earlier this week, Beth was very clear that being King of Poo is very much a good thing!

This is Josh’s first jamboree and he “smashed it on our set up day” doing a lot of heavy lifting and whacking with sledgehammers. “To say Josh is a grafter is to put it mildly and we always reward the best of us,”, Beth told me with clear feeling, once again showing the unique bond within this team. I was intrigued to hear about the poo emoji hat and Beth told me the rise of the poo emoji has really helped with team theming in recent years! “This year we really went all out, we created our slogan for the first time in 2016 which is ‘You chuck it, we suck it’. We had done a lot of planning for 2020 which we didn’t get to use so we built on that, and I will say the popularity of the poo emoji has really helped us get a theme! The head of department’s daughter got a poo emoji duvet set and made us all neckers, we’ve got stickers, we’ve got key rings for the tractor keys.” They really are all decked out!

There is so very much more that could be said about this incredible team, the bond they have with each other is absolutely and immediately clear to see and it cannot be overstated just how important the job they do is. The Jamboree quite literally would not function without them. This year they are under even more than usual strain and are over 100 volunteers down on the last EIJ. “We are coping but if anyone fancies wiping down a sink once in a while we would be grateful!” As I spoke to the team, they had in fact just taken on a Canadian volunteer who was being trained up as we spoke. It certainly is not the most glamourous job on the list, but it is no exaggeration to say that this event would quite literally not be able to happen without them.

So the moral of the story is, the dirtier the job, the funnier the job and if you see a tractor driving by with a poo emoji flag or a pickup truck decorated with bits of rubbish, give them a wave. The word ‘vital’ does not adequately describe this team and all they do and if you fancy signing up, there will always be the warmest of welcomes!