This is Bowie, doing my last year Geography course at University College London. To mark the end of my university life, I have decided to go to Kenya in Africa this summer for a 10-week volunteering programme.
The Volunteering Programme
With a volunteering organization called Education Partnerships Africa (EPAfrica), around 50 university students from London, Cambridge and Oxford will be going to Kenya and Uganda from the end of June to mid September 2014. Each project worker has to fundraise £2,300 in London now, which will be used to purchase the air tickets to and from Africa and to support an associated district secondary school in Africa. For me, I have been assigned to a school in Kakamega, Kenya. I will assess the needs of the school in aspects of physical facilities and resources and the delivery of health, gender and extracurricular education. A lot of communication will be done with the head of school and staff to ensure that the approximate of £2,000 will be invested wisely in the school (calculated based on money fundraised by two volunteers). At the end of the summer, we hope to see that basic facilities will have been acquired by the school, welfare of the students improved, and adjustment be made to the curriculum of the students so that health, gender, and extracurricular education will be appropriately included. We hope that effort paid by volunteers in the past can be sustained.
You may check out this official website of EPAfrica to understand more about the work: www.epafrica.org.
Why I am volunteering in Africa
Coming from a developed nation, I have always wanted to know people who live a life much closer to nature. That was the initial motive of me joining the volunteering programme. Yet more so, I want to experience the east and sub-Saharan African culture, see the real needs of the people, and observe how transnational and local volunteering initiatives are impacting the community, positively or negatively. If there is a chance for evangelicalism, I also hope that this would be my first mission trip in Africa. This will also be my first volunteering experience abroad (as in not in Hong Kong or the UK) – excited!
Donations
All donations are fundraised in the name of EPAfrica. Unused money in my project, if there is, will therefore be used in other projects of the organization for the same purpose of supporting district schools.
Please support me and my fellow project workers at EPAfrica!