A gap year experience
Geoffrey Cundall shares his grand-daughter's stories
Our granddaughter, Philippa, is a fun-loving twenty-year-old. In her gap year before going to university, she and a school friend worked at Marks & Spencer and saved enough to pay to go and teach for a time in Tanzania, where they are now. They have also organised fund-raising events to buy useful things and money to donate. They told the chairman, Bootham Old Scholar, Stuart Rose of their intent and he doubled the amount they raised. The following account is extracts of Philippa’s emails.
I am having the best time! It is so strange I feel like I’m dreaming because none of it seems real! The locals are very welcoming and nice. Some scary times but we are with pretty much all boys and they are nice and very protective of us so its all good!
I have started teaching in a nursery school in a morning, which I love! In the nursery there are two classes – each of about seventy. They are amazing kids but it breaks my heart to see the facilities they have although they seem happy with them. They are also very grateful for what we are giving and doing! On an afternoon we teach the Masai men who come to us for further English lessons and I love doing it because they are such interesting people. We hold a debate after the class for the more advanced students, which I also love; yesterday the topic was ‘Is religion necessary?’ and they came up with that themselves. It was so interesting to hear their views on things like that! Everyone helps us to learn the language, which I can do sometimes, but struggle at others!
We have had a very good week this week; we feel like we have made lots of people happy! On Monday we did the sponsoring. We are sponsoring sixty-three children from our nursery to go to primary school as they can’t afford to go. We’re paying for a year for most of them including uniform and so on so that’s a fair amount of what we have left! It was a very emotional day yesterday because that’s when we decided to do it and all the kids and teachers were praying and thanking us and you could just see how much it meant so I was a state as you can imagine!!
At the end of the day they have porridge; it looks horrible – it’s made out of maize, sugar and cooking oil but the kids love it and depend on it, but they can only have it when volunteers donate it, so on Monday we will take 250,000 tsh, (around £110) for the teachers to go and buy a month’s supply because if we go to the market for it they will rip us off for ‘white people price’. We have taken all the clothes we brought out to the orphanage and they were over the moon, so excited it was amazing! We’ve also taken all the underwear to the orphanage, which was even better than giving them the clothes! They got at least two pairs each and I have never seen kids so happy before – especially over underwear!! It was magical! They all came and shook our hands one by one and said thank you and gave us a hug!
The house we stay in is very basic but we have easily adapted and are cool with everything! It’s slightly out of the town so a nice walk everyday through the crop fields and shanty towns with an amazing view of Kilimanjaro!
Nearing the end of her stay, she writes: I’m a bit worried about coming back home as I’m not a big fan of western culture after being here. Talking with some of the boys we decided it wouldn’t be till we got back into the routines we were in before, if we had changed our outlooks, but I’m pretty sure I have.
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