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Willow

Niece 'volunteering' in Africa

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Aargh need to vent somewhere. My wealthy sil has just put a msg on Facebook asking friends and family to sponsor 15yr old niece who has to raise £2000 to go towards her school volunteer trip to Malawi, 15yr old proposes to give up her electronic devices for a week.

Everything about this fills me with anger, I love my niece but she understand nothing of how people live. 3 years ago when she was visiting us for the weekend from boarding school she was bewildered when I went into the kitchen Sunday morning to start peeling veg for Sunday dinner. They've always had servants so she had no idea normal people prepared their own food and cooked it, as far as she knew food appeared on the table ready to eat and if she didn't fancy it she left it. We were all pottering in the garden clearing one weekend she was staying with us and she was asked to do some weeding to help as I had had an operation and was unable to do anything she sloped off after about 10 mins. 

She is idle, has no practical skills and is not physically strong so she will be absolutely no use 'helping a local community', none of the girls from her school,will be any more use, they all have the arrogance that they are somehow superior to the poor just because they are wealthy. 'Volunteers' like this are just exploiting the poor to make themselves feel good 😡 The school will carefully manage the trip to hide unsavoury aspects of poverty and make the girls feel like they are doing good.

Giving up electronics for  a week is not exactly putting in an effort frankly, she'll probably spend more time in their pool that week instead.

Niece owns land in her name somewhere like the Cayman Islands already, her parents own multiple properties dotted around the world. They have serious serious amounts of money. Whilst we're comfortably off I kind of object to being asked to pony up for such an exploitative reasons and such a pathetic sponsorship 'hardship' I'd rather give more to a genuine charity.

Am I just being a grump? If I was reviewing university or job applications I'd look at this sort of school trip on personal statements with great suspicion.

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No you’re not grumpy.

My old school (now work at a ‘normal’ school) had something similar. Most kids are very well off and they had to do charity trip in the year before exams. It became almost a contest of who could go to the most exotic far off place, with trips to South Africa, Japan, Burundi, Surinam and an native American tribe in the US. Most of the donations came from food fairs in school and I refused to cough up any more money after a while. Most trips had one week of actual work and one week of holiday, including cage diving with Great Whites in Sout Africa... 

I rather would have them invest in local initiatives, so they get to see how the other half lives in their own freaking country!

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Gosh sounds a very spoilt young lady. Perhaps this will be the wake up call she needs. No matter how they sanitise it she will see extreme poverty, hardship and a very different life to hers. Would there be any point suggesting she does something for money, ie babysitting, car boot sale etc. Am sure she has stacks of things she could flog to get the money. If she did that everyone could donate items for the stall. They are very young to be going over. The practice nurse I worked with did 3 months somewhere similar with operation Raleigh and she was very depressed when she came back and found it hard to get back into our throw away society.

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An adult with a useful skill who goes out prepared to work  is very different thing. The school,won't expose them to anything that might make them question their privilege 

she lives in a compound overseas in the sort of society with many local servants so no jobs for spoilt rich girls, selling her things would not be a hardship as they would all be replaced, for her DoE the school arranged for the girls to help with younger pupils as their voluntary work 😡 I was pretty annoyed about that too, they should have been doing something in the local community not unpaid help for a commercial enterprise 

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Cats tails, agree re local iniatives. I realised as an adult we were really quite poor as children (not always sure where the next meal was coming from and new schools were whatever was cheap or available handmedown) .

These girls could go help pack bags at the local food bank or volunteer to do the collections at the supermarket.

 

I don't think this school does anything as plebeian as food fairs, they may not be able to ship the servants over to make cakes to contribute 🙄

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