WANT to travel to foreign countries, meet the locals, bring back some great stories to impress people at university? This article isn’t for you.

Students Partnership Worldwide (SPW) emphasises that it is “not a gap-year provider”. But it wants students on a gap year, whether before university, immediately afterwards or a couple of years into their career, to work on international projects in Africa and Asia.

SPW trains young adults as volunteer “peer educators” to lead programmes that address health and environmental issues in the Third World. They have more than 800 volunteers, who between them reach 400,000 young people a year in Africa and Asia. They live in rural communities for up to nine months and establish a rapport with young locals, who are more likely to listen to people of their own age than teachers or parents. By spreading knowledge to the next generation, SPW hopes they can be a local catalyst for change.

William Horwitz, now reading natural sciences at Cambridge, spent eight months in Zambia with SPW. He says: “Before I went I had the usual hazy view of Africa that something was wrong and that we should be doing something. Then I lived in a village called Chisamba, in the Central Province of Zambia, where the teachers and our neighbours and friends taught me more about kindness, generosity and sharing than I ever learnt in England.”

Horwitz left Heathrow with just a rucksack and a nervous smile. “I was lacking in self-confidence and terrified. A few months later I was prancing round a classroom packed with 80 Zambian kids stretching my acting skills to the limit by playing a virus attacking the immune system.”

HIV education is one of the most pressing concerns for SPW. More than 11 million young people aged between 15 and 24 in developing countries live with HIV and Aids. It is estimated that 60 per cent of all new HIV infections occur in this age group. The everyday relationship people in Africa have with death is often hard for volunteers to accept.

Ellie Messham spent her gap year in rural Uganda. She says: “I no longer say ‘I need’ when I mean ‘I want’. ‘Need’ has a different meaning when you see people in clothes that are more holes than fabric, struggling to feed a family on 30p a day.”

Ellie now chairs the Stop Aids campaign at Manchester University and has met Hillary Benn, the International Development Secretary, to discuss the way in which the West is tackling the epidemic. This was no simple gap year, but a change in life direction.

PATRICK KIDD

www.spw.org

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