A study in practicality
Making the World a Better Place. It's a great idea, isn't it? And one that many of us have on our Future Plans list, usually some time after Getting Job, Making Money and Seeing World have all been ticked off. If you're lucky they're all combined; I can't help but feel a pang of jealousy for the medicine students among us who know what they want to do and are well on the way to achieving it, without the dilemma of selling their souls versus saving the world. Or perhaps a worthwhile Gap Year can lessen the guilt about the lucrative pay packet we look forward to post-Oxford.
For Mike Scott, however, a Gap Year was only the beginning. He and Nick Renshaw, both Teddy Hall geographers, are the founders of Oxford Development Abroad, "a student charity that harnesses the energy and enthusiasm of students studying in Oxford to assist development projects in the third world", according to its website. Their story is inspirational, yet on meeting these finalist students they strike me as two of the most laid-back I have come across, and even they themselves seem surprised by what they have achieved, "a product of weeks of idle chit-chat that remarkably turned into something real".
Their motivation behind setting up ODA lay partly in the frustratingly speculative nature of their degree work. "With geography, we were always reading about situations in these areas and development projects, but not really doing anything about it," explains Renshaw. "It's so dangerously easy to slip into student lethargic mode."
So as an attempt to deter such lethargy and to tackle global problems beyond their seat in the lecture theatre, ODA was born. By their first-year summer the first project had been successfully set up in Nepal, where there have since been two more, and future projects are planned for Tanzania, Senegal, Bangladesh, Nepal and Argentina.
Having worked for UNICEF and SPW in his Gap Year, Scott had numerous contacts to help with the direction of the charity, but the students' own theories were clearly instrumental. "These big companies put lots of money into problems, but there's a real need to readdress specific problems with specific needs," believes Scott. "We look at individual communities to make decisions and formulate projects, sometimes working with NGOs but preferably directly."
As a result, volunteers can find themselves laying water pipes, building smoker stoves or teaching in a school for failed adults - whatever is deemed most beneficial for the particular area they are assisting.
"The idea is to create a partnership between students and communities. The volunteers live and work in rural villages of 70 to 80 houses, usually staying in a house high up in the village hierarchy," Scott tells me, quickly adding, "But we don't want to impose - we're there to add to the unskilled labour." These objectives are clearly admirable, but do they worry that some students will sign up with the lesser intention of a fun and exotic summer abroad?
"We're definitely not focused on travel," insists Renshaw, "and it's easy to spot the applicants who are, by the odd comment they drop in during interviews. It takes a lot of commitment - volunteers have to fundraise their own project costs and have a full week's training when they get out there."
Both students are keen to differentiate ODA from the myriad of other companies that enable work and travel abroad, and Scott seems particularly worried about the damaging effect such organisations can have. "People who do them are not necessarily doing what they want. These are very rural, conservative communities and a bunch of wild 18-year-olds smoking lots of dope just shouldn't be there. It's wrong of the companies to allow it.
"Also, they make you pay a lot of money for not much. On such placements you can't see how much of a difference you are making, and you're often quite cut off from the reality."
With ODA, he argues, it's the volunteers that drive the project. "They really act as a catalyst to those communities to help themselves" - an experience that Renshaw calls "fucking awesome".
"Coming back to England is the biggest culture shock. You've got no sense of time, of electricity. It's such a different pace of life. Shortly after I got back I was in the bank and a woman started complaining about the queue. I just flipped out at her!"
Both deeply attached to ODA, Renshaw and Scott both hope to work in the charity sector in the future and seem regretful that they will soon be handing their brainchild over to other Oxford students, though they are confident ODA will continue to flourish. Last term they held a conference in Edinburgh in conjunction with similar nationwide student charities, to discuss taking their work to another platform, perhaps by campaigning. At this university, more renowned for its abstract intellect than practical problem solving, students such as these provide a much-needed link: as their lecturer told them, just thinking about the issues is "intellectual masturbation". If an Oxford degree means we can solve the world's problems in our essays, why not do it for real?
29th Jan 2004