In January 2002 I travelled to Belize to be a volunteer teacher in the village school of Louisville, a small village about ten miles from the border with Mexico in the north of Belize. Teaching was the most rewarding experience imaginable, and when I shared stories with friends who had simply gone back-packing in Australia or the like, I realised how much I was able to gain by living with a native family and not passing by as a tourist. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Trustees of the Bulkeley-Evans HMC Scholarship for their help in making my trip possible. Encouraging gap year students to travel and get the most out of their year of freedom is wonderful, and I can't underestimate how valuable your help was. I hope I have managed to convey accurately some of the excitement, pleasure and satisfaction I gained out of my year out, and how it has planted in me new ambitions and plans for the future. It does scare me somewhat that some people dismiss gap years due for financial reasons and hence miss out on these experiences. I do hope you continue to make these experiences possible for some of these people for years to come.

One of the junior houses at Oakham School had raised over £500 to help the Thai people recover their businesses and help them rebuilt housing and support their families. I was lucky enough to be asked to use this money ‘however would best help the Thai people I was working with’. All the people were so grateful for whatever they had been given, however big or small the gift may have been. We attended an amazing memorial service on February 26th. 1,000 monks gathered at the front of a huge grassy area, and there were 40,000 people attending, a mixture of foreigners and Thais. The service was led by various leaders from different countries, and was translated into every imaginable language. The service started at dusk and by the end we had each lit a lantern in front of us in a glass bowl and to end with 10,000 paper lanterns were lit and sent up into the night sky. It was the most incredible sight and such a fantastic way of remembering those people who had lost their lives and their families. Leaving the area was horrible. The younger children couldn’t understand that we weren’t coming back and the adults and older children were very emotional. It was very hard to leave them having come into their lives and built up such trust and close friendships and now to go and travel back to the other side of the world again, back to a place where people grumble when the washing machine doesn’t work or there’s a power cut. My time with these people has really made me value things that I may have before taken for granted, especially family.