York-based Benenden Healthcare Society has awarded a prestigious travelling fellowship to a local resident who wishes to work with child victims of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa.
Award-winner Emily Simpson, 21, of Holgate will be travelling to Tanzania to work with disadvantaged children. The award of up to £3,000 is given annually to a member of staff at Benenden by the Lord Plant Memorial Trust to allow Benenden staff to help develop their personal and work skills and to examine healthcare issues in other countries.
Emily will be spending four weeks in Moshi, a town in the north of Tanzania close to Mount Kilimanjaro, on a project being run by the organisation ‘i-to-i’ and will be travelling out in January 2009.
She is already an active volunteer, being involved in the York Cares project helping to run a reading group every Tuesday in York Library for adults with learning difficulties.
A former pupil of Woldgate Secondary School in Pocklington, Emily was keen to apply for this fellowship in order to progress her personal and professional development.
Emily said: “I already help people within my local community but to go further afield and help those in a different country who need help just as much, if not more, will be an amazingly rewarding experience and a chance for me to give something back on a wider scale.”
“The benefit to my own development would be immeasurable. Volunteering and helping people with learning difficulties is something I am really very passionate about. The chance to do this in an area which is culturally very different, poverty stricken and crying out for volunteers is going to be really rewarding and I’m sure, life changing.”
Emily made her application in June this year, subsequently attending an interview with the board of trustees of the Lord Plant Memorial Trust. She heard of her success last week and is now putting together the final plans for her travel.
