RAF ‘Tough Mudders’ top £500 for SSAFA

07 October 2022

Flanders and Swann may have penned The Hippopotamus Song with its memorable refrain “Mud, mud glorious mud. Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood…” but cooling the blood was far from the minds of Air Specialist (AS) Class 1 Dawa Lama and others who took on a recent Tough Mudder – and raised £500 for SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity in the process.

Lama, born in Dhading, Nepal and based at RAF Brize Norton, joined the RAF in March 2021. He organised the fundraiser with three others from the same Phase 1 training at RAF Halton – Corporal Melissa Gaffey, AS Marcelle Lowe, and AS Andrew Duffy – with Lama’s civilian girlfriend Beth Taylor bringing it up to a quintet for the endurance event held at Badminton.

Explaining his reasons for organising the arduous fundraiser for SSAFA – the UK’s oldest tri-service charity – Lama said: “During our Phase 1 training at Halton, we had a day of briefs from many different and wonderful charities that had a big impact on myself and the team. Since that day I have always wanted to help out and make a contribution – no matter how little – to help the charities with the great work that they do.”

Lama said that, beyond each member’s own service, the team has many Armed Forces connections, including his father who served for more than 20 years in the Gurkhas and his girlfriend’s father who was in the RAF.

He added: “SSAFA provides amazing support and care to the Armed Forces community, and it works in close partnership with other military charities and specialist organisations to provide direct specialised support to personnel in need of help from any physical, emotional, or social issues and so, So, the decision to pick SSAFA as our charity of choice for the event was pretty simple.”