Chance Harmon
English 105
Ms. Chew
February 4, 2013
Alive as a Team Imagine being in the dark cold and not knowing what time it is, where you are, when you will be rescued, how you will survive, and having to depend on other people besides yourself every minute in order to survive. The Uruguayan rugby team was under these exact circumstances as they were on the way to Chile for a rugby match and crashed into the Andes Mountains. Without a radio or any other device for communication the rugby team had to come up with a plan on how to rescue their selves and stay alive. The best plan that Uruguayan rugby team had come up with in my eyes was teamwork. Teamwork is to stay together and work together no matter the tough conditions or the so-called rainy days. You can’t lose your temper at each other fifteen thousand feet in the air with nobody coming, because this can make matters tougher for everyone. Teamwork doesn’t always occur in just sports. The men of the Uruguayan rugby team weren’t acting as a team in a sport but as a team to stay alive in the cold, harsh, freezing temperatures. Although, the Uruguayan rugby players had some assets to help in the harsh weather such as toughness, endurance, and stamina all traits coming from playing rugby. In order for the rugby players to even have a chance to survive they must cooperate and work as a team. Only two people were killed initially by the crash. After the crash, all the seats were pushing people up against the wall and all the seats were ripped from the original place it was once in (30). The roof had been ripped off, the tail was gone, and the plane looked completely trashed and abnormal (30). After the crash people were stuck and couldn’t move, so Marcelo Perez said that the injured should be moved out the plane which would take a lot of work from the people that weren’t injured and by the ones that weren’t seriously injured. Also it was Perez’s idea to take the seat cushions and use them as stepping cushions so you could step on the snow and the snow wouldn’t go all the way up to your thigh. It took teamwork to get those people out of the plane and into the snow (33). It was quickly figured out in the book that if the roof and tail was left open with these brutal subzero temperatures then people would start to get cold and even catch hypothermia and die. It also took teamwork to make the bed and fix the plane so limited wind and cold weather got in the plane. Some beds were made like hammocks to keep the injured off the ground so they wouldn’t get stepped on or rolled on. The plane was fixed to be like a shelter with everything they found useful, but the most useful thing to make the shelter was the seats. Most of the people were injured in this crash. It took a tremendous amount of teamwork and effort to build these beds and to build the shelter. Later on in the book a series of avalanches occurred in which limited the plane down to only sixteen alive (121). The avalanche filled the plane the first time it came around. The second time the avalanche came; the plane just got passed over by it since the plane was already filled with snow. Through times of adversity like this the rugby players and the people still alive must stick together and not let the bad things get to them. It takes teamwork to rebuild the shelter that got knocked down. It really takes teamwork to find and try to save the people that were buried by the avalanche. The rule on the plane was to try and save the people that Carlito Paez, Canessa, and Parrado could see (125). These three were faced with a very difficult decision because they knew they couldn’t save everyone, but with teamwork they could save some people that were visible and were communicating with them still. It takes teamwork to have all that hard work of building the actual shelter to having it collapse due to an avalanche and then rebuild it with the scarce amount of items they had left after the avalanche. With all their