This year some of the volunteers from the Malta Red Cross Gozo Branch were faced with a rather different and un-usual challenge-that of cleaning up the vertical heights of the Cittadella bastions from weed. For quite a time, there has been the need for our branch to provide a new service regarding disaster response, and of course an essential part of this section had to be Rope Rescue. This year the Ministry of Gozo offered us the project of cleaning up the Cittadella walls.

With the job in hand, a group volunteers started a training in abseiling. Joseph Theuma, who gave us the training in abseiling. To prepare our selves both physically and mentally for this activity we visited some locations in Gozo, like Dwejra and Mgarr ix-Xini where some abseiling sessions.

In due course, we had accumulated enough training so as to start de-weeding the bastions. This task was quite arduous at first, for it involved a lot of planning beforehand to ensure safety for us and not causing damage to the walls. It was also a pleasant task and gave a shot of adrenaline in most of us. The clean up involved first by carefully removing the weed manually, then a few weeks afterwards when shoots started to grow up again, they were treated with a herbicide.