A Hampshire college student, pictured with club president Rosemary Coward, gave members a vivid account of a month spent doing voluntary work in Kenya, sometimes living like a local with no running water.
Katherine Needham, a 17 year-old student at Barton Peveril College, Eastleigh, described her trip last year as a life-changing experience. “Meeting poor but happy people there made me realise how much we take for granted in this country,” she said.
She had travelled with Camps International, a specialist expedition company that offers responsible travel experiences in a number of countries including Kenya. They have permanent camps located alongside local communities that they work with on various projects.
Katherine described her time at four different camps working on projects such as marine conservation, clearing tons of flip-flops and plastic bags that threaten an endangered species of turtle, building beds for a local health centre, desks for a school and even making paper from elephant poo that can be turned into notebooks.
Her talk was accompanied by slides such as one of an elephant statue made of the wire traps used by poachers to trap them for their valuable ivory tusks.
She mentioned some fascinating things such as the occasional banning of taking photographs as “it might upset the spirits in the sacred forest” and the existence of an entire football team from one family. “The mother had 22 children,” said Katherine to gasps from one or two members of her audience.
At one camp she and around thirty other students helped to build the floor and walls of a building that would eventually house a nursery to enable mothers to go out to work. “It was hard work mixing cement with just basic tools as there wasn’t a cement mixer,” she said.
Because one of the students in her group dropped out at the last moment they were left with £3,300 in the kitty. They spent this on an operation to restore the sight of a local boy and to support his aftercare. “If every group that travelled out there did something similar we would eventually change the whole of Africa,” she said.