2006 Global Adventures Project

March 22nd, 2006

The experience of a lifetime awaits Rachael Keightley after she won a place on the 2006 Global Adventures Project - one of only 20 selected from more than 600 applicants.

In July, the Tollbar Business & Enterprise College Year 13 student will jet off to South Africa for three months voluntary work which will include teaching in a primary school and helping in an orphanage and with a project to rebuild a township.

Rachael applied to the Project after seeing a notice on the Tollbar Sixth Form refectory notice board and following an interview with the organisers received the news that she has won a place.

And though the trip costs £14,000, she has to find only £450, thanks to sponsorship from the HSBC Educational Trust. An accomplished musician, playing oboe, saxophone and piano, she is organising a concert in Scartho’s St Giles Church in April to help fund her trip.

The Global Adventures Project is a division of the American Institute for Foreign Study which, since it was founded in 1964, has sent more than a million young people abroad on educational programmes.

Rachael explained that only four students from this year’s group will be going to South Africa with the rest going as far afield as China, Brazil and India.

“I wanted to go to South Africa because the programme includes a course at the Stellenbosch University where we will be staying,” she said.

She and her parents will attend a meeting with the project organisers on March 28, and Rachael will then take an induction course on April 1 and 2.

One of the places she will be working is the Cotlands Hospice, a charitable institution that provides a home for around 60 children orphaned by, or suffering from, HIV/AIDS.

Here she will find a close Grimsby connection. Cotlands is supported by the Rotary Club of Lombardy, where the centre is situated. One of this club’s founder members is Geoffrey Hobson, brother of Grimsby fish merchant Bill Hobson and the Rotary Club of Grimsby St James has been involved in fund-raising Cotlands.

Rachael takes her A Levels examinations before the trip and on her return intends to go on to university to study law.

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