Gap-Year Students Are No Good To Anyone
“GAP-year students told to forget aid projects,” say the Times’ front-page headline.
There’s a picture of Prince Harry, who took a gap from getting plastered in Boujis and playing soldiers, tending a garden in Lesotho.
Interesting to note that back home in Houses Clarence and Highgrove there is an Army of gardeners tending plants. In Prince Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall estate, there are people expert in making organic jam and chutney.
Was there no room for Harry in the Windsors’ garden party? Better perhaps had the Palace sent one of these trained horticulturalists to Africa than an unskilled teenager, and taught the boy a trade back home.
The Voluntary Service Overseas is concerned that gap-year projects benefit no-one aside from the travel companies that organise them and the youths looking for an experience.
Do-gooding teens can feel superior to their peers backpacking working a bar in Faliraki and selling timeshare in Marbella by paying £2,400 to work on a South African horse safari and £1,895 “observing coral and marine life in Borneo”.
Readers learn of the volunteer to Mexico who paid to work on a conservation project and spent six months behind a desk inputting data. And there’s the volunteer teacher who discovered that her placement had led to the real teacher being made redundant.
Meanwhile, Harry is putting his gardening skills to good use by crawling in the undergrowth and showing a photographer his haymaker…
Posted: 14th, August 2007 | In: Broadsheets Comments (5) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Comments
- ptet on Dietmar The German Stork Has A Wooden Leg
- yampster on Susan Boyle Weeps As The Press Set About Destroying Her
- Nansubuga on Michelle Obama Is A Monkey And Other Offensive Google Images
- yampster on Strictly Come Dancing’s Alesha Dixon Sparks I’m A Celebrity Race Row
- Lonnirose on Susan Boyle Weeps As The Press Set About Destroying Her
August 15th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Miles - are you on a VSO prgramme?
August 15th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
QUEST were saddened by recent articles telling gap-year students to forget aid projects. QUEST volunteers have directly benefited the communities they visited with financial aid as well as their hard work. In total QUEST volunteers have raised over £1 million directly for overseas projects and have returned to the UK much more culturally aware and with far more experiences of the true side of the countries they are visiting than if they had stayed in backpacker hostels.
August 14th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
He probably would have rolled em and smoked em.
Could have been a bonus if he’d passed what he rolled around - troops too lethargic to do any damage but making friends with the locals in the hope they can lead them to the nearest junk food outlet.
Randie
August 14th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
He could have planted a garden in Babylon… And picked the weeds
August 14th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
‘They’ should have let him go to Iraq