Adventures w
Raleigh Intern
*GAP YAH TRIGGER WARNING –
THIS ARTICLE MAY CONTAIN
UNRESTRAINED PROSE ABOUT
‘SELFLESS’ VOLUNTEERING,
LIFE CHANGING EXPERIENCES
AND ‘FINDING MYSELF’*
What is it?
It is a charity that focuses on
inspiring young people and
communities to create lasting
change. That is what it says on their
website, but for me those are just
words. It is a charity that took me to
the other side of the world (for a very
large fee but we shall ignore that) to
do some incredible things. The core
of the charity is about making
sustainable change, I know that 2
years on at least some of my
changes are still improving lives. The
money I paid enabled a lot of more
disadvantaged people from across
the UK and the rest of the world to
have the same experience as me.
Gap year volunteering agencies
have now become a business. It is
hard to tell the difference between
those determined to make a change
and those determined to make a
profit. I genuinely believe Raleigh
International does everything in its
power to maintain integrity.
What did I actually do?
I spent 10 weeks in Malaysian
Borneo with no access to a phone or
internet, cut off from the outside
world. The cut off point for me was
around 4am UK time on June 24 th
2016. The exact moment leave had
won Brexit. I can’t decide if I was glad
to miss the aftermath or if I was sad to
miss out on all that drama. My time
was split into 3 placements. My first
placement was trekking through the
rainforest for 3 weeks carrying
everything we would need in that
time on our backs. At the beginning
of the trek my bag weighed roughly
25kg, but thankfully got lighter as
we made our way through our
supplies. This was the ‘self
development’ section of the trip. We
would set up camp every night,
putting up our hammocks and tarps
wherever we had got to. We cooked
on an open fire and collected water
from any nearby streams. The toilet
was a hole in the ground with a
constant risk of being bitten on the
arse by a snake; it is fair to say my
fear of unhygienic public toilets felt
trivial after. We stopped at
waterfalls, so all the white girls
could get their Instagrams from
South East Asia. We watched many
sunrises and sunsets, enabling
everyone to have their life changing
epiphanies. We interacted with the
locals, so we could all feel a little
more cultured. However, overall it
was tough, but the pain was worth
it. I came out with hench legs and a
new outlook on life after ‘finding
myself’ on top of a mountain (big
hill). My second placement was in
the few areas of completely
untouched primary rainforest left in
the world. We were told we were
helping a research centre build a
bridge and doing some camera
trapping. In reality, we moved gravel
and cement with intermittent
viewings of orangutans for 3 weeks.
The living set up felt like the Hilton
after spending three weeks on the
move. We had toilets, showers, a
gas stove and permanent
hammocks set up. Unfortunately
this was still all outside and a few
local animals had caught on to the
fact we were storing a lot of food
with us. We soon had a Civet, a
family of bearded pigs and a
tarantula as our pets. We attempted
camera trapping but the only animal
we managed to capture was a
firefly. This really highlighted for me
how unpopulated the jungle was
becoming. With orangutans on the
brink of extinction, alongside other
animals, it inspired me to make
some changes. Specifically, in
Borneo, there is a problem of the