Someone compiled pictures of the everyday heroes involved in the Thailand cave rescue mission

Faith in humanity restored.

Tanya Ong | July 11, 2018, 10:53 AM

The Thai Wild Boars football team and their coach were finally extracted successfully from a flooded cave complex in Chiang Rai, Thailand, in the evening of Tuesday, July 10, 2018.

This was after more than 18 days, nine of which rescuers spent searching for them.

And this event, which involved a complicated three-day operation prior to the extraction, has brought many people together.

One viral Facebook post by one Anindya Ghose shows exactly this, providing a compilation of pictures sourced from the Twitter feed of various people on the ground in Chiang Rai.

Everyday faces of the rescue mission

The pictures reveal some of the faces behind the mammoth rescue operation, including volunteers, local business owners, and even farmers.

These are the photos Ghose shared:

Vern Unsworthy is a British cave explorer based in Thailand. He was the one who called on the British divers for help.

He also used his knowledge of the cave to calculate where the group was mostly likely to be.

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Coach Ekapol Chanthawong served an instrumental role in helping the boys.

The 25-year-old taught them meditation, and gave them most of his food and water.

Saman Guran, a former Thai Navy SEAL, "gave up his life so that the trapped kids and the coach could have enough supply of oxygen which had fallen to 15 per cent in their part of the cave."

He lost consciousness on his way out and died shortly after.

Regarded as the best cave divers in the world, British cave divers John Volanthen and Rick Stanton led the rescue operation.

Stanton, a retired firefighter, was the first person to find the boys last week along with Volanthen.

Both men have received honours for their previous rescue work.

The volunteers of the rescue mission, estimated to number in the "hundreds", worked tirelessly and without reward to get the boys out safely.

Locals cooked free food for the rescue team for two weeks and delivered it to the area on their bikes.

A team of Muslim volunteers cooked free Halal food for the Muslim rescuers.

The owner of a local laundry shop kept the place running every night in order to wash the uniforms of the rescue team on a voluntary basis.

The owner of a local dive shop gave oxygen cylinders to the cave divers for free.

The farmers living near the cave allowed the rescue operation to flood their rice fields in order to drain the cave complex to facilitate the evacuation.

This would damage or even destroy their crops, but Ghose wrote that the farmers were ready "to do more".

The water pumping team, moved by the farmers' gesture, supposedly "decided not to go home until [they] finish[ed] pumping the water".

Bird nest collectors also put their knowledge of mountains and rock climbing skills to good use by scouring for alternative routes that could reach the boys.

Humanity at its best

"Sometimes, the worst of times brings out the best in people," Ghose wrote in his Facebook post.

However, this compilation of pictures is what "real life heroes and humanity at (its) best looks like."

The post, which was written on Tuesday morning (July 10), has gotten over 48,000 shares on Facebook.

You can see it here:

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Top photo from Anindya Ghose's Facebook post.