All posts tagged: Development

Chicuchas Wasi: Fighting for Girls’ Education in Peru

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My final Global Giving project, and what’s brought me to the bustling high altitude town of Cusco for so long is a girls’ primary school nearby. Chicuchas Wasi was started by Rae Lewis, who I had the pleasure to touch base with first in California. She told me the story of how the school began when she was travelling in Peru. Moved by what she saw and wanting to help, she did so at first by looking after street children in her own home. I finally get to meet her partner in all this, Ruth Uribe, who lives in Cusco and directs the school. She picks me up at the bottom of the steps to her home and we drive the short distance over to the school, including a struggle with a rocky dirt road. We bond over our language studies, as Ruth’s learning English just now, speaking in both Spanish and English over the idiosyncrasies of our languages, double-checking vocabulary and points of grammar with each other. Placed amicably among the rolling hills of …

Port-Au-Prince five years on: the road to recovery

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I have a strange and accidental habit of visiting the sites of major disasters. In 2005 I went to Sri Lanka, just six months after its coasts were desecrated by the tsunami. In 2011, I spent a week in Christchurch, New Zealand not long after the town was completely destroyed by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. And this year, Haiti was chosen as part of my Global Giving field evaluation itinerary, five years after it lost nearly 100,000 lives to an earthquake of its own. I also had the great opportunity earlier this year to be able to work at the offices of the Disasters Emergency Committee in London, supporting them with social media as they launched the Nepal Earthquake Appeal. Although I may have been close to disaster sites in the past, this was the first time I was able to see the relief effort first hand, from the incredible outpouring of generosity from those across the world to the amazing life-saving work taking place out in the field. But what was so interesting about the …

Avoiding voluntourism – how to choose a volunteering project overseas

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There’s been a fair amount of negative rhetoric in the media recently about volunteering abroad, or as people have come to label it: voluntourism. The Gap Yah videos highlighted a caricature everyone can recognise in at least one of their acquaintances – that self-righteous and ultimately vacuous individual who reports tirelessly on their quest for self-enlightenment in various third world countries. So when I was thinking about quitting my job, travelling abroad and giving up some of my time to a charity, I had these concerns at the front of my mind, keen to avoid becoming part of this troubling group. I was reminded of the stories you sometimes hear about volunteers in the UK: big businesses sending skilled employees out to help a cause, but the charity lacking the resources to prepare for it. And, whilst they don’t need the offered time, they could very much use the cash donation that comes with the deal. So the loaned workers are deployed in the more menial daily tasks of running the organisation: gardening, cleaning, the making of …

Guess my profession: working in a much maligned sector

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I wonder if you can guess what I do as a job. I’ll give you a clue… When I tell people where I work they’re often sceptical, sometimes incensed. Further probing can lead to public shouting matches and the smashing of glass objects. Many promising new relationships have been ruined in this way. The conversation will be flowing effortlessly, with laughter in all the right places, until we get to that place in the script: “What do you do for a living?” I’ll break eye contact here, clear my throat and offer up my answer apologetically. The more violent reactions seem to come from my dad’s friends. He’s introduced me to a few people, only to come back a few minutes later to find a somewhat sulky silence and shattered glass at our feet. Banker may have been your first guess. Estate agent, politician, lawyer, police officer – no wait, that’s me just reading out the list of the world’s most hated professions. I actually work for a charity. And since the beginning of my …

How to quit your job for the next adventure

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“When life gives you lemons, just say: fuck the lemons – and bail.” I’m 25 and I’ve just been through my first divorce. Okay, not actually a divorce – not legally, anyway. But take the breakdown of a four and a half year relationship, a property dispute and the ultimate abandonment of my largest friendship group, and we’re getting pretty close. Walking across the park opposite the property in question, adjusting to the news my childhood friends no longer wish to own it with me, and for the first time in my life I wonder if there really could be some kind of divine being out there… divining. How could such a year, such a progression of rejection fall to me at random? There must be a cruel and masochistic orchestrator. That, or I’ve recently developed a repellent quality, unknown to myself, so abhorrent people run screaming from my presence. A lingering smell, perhaps. I’ve been advised that the latter fear is ludicrous, and I can’t quite bring myself to believe the former, my atheism far too …