A group of twenty Lower Sixth pupils from Dauntsey’s School are busy fundraising for their forthcoming trip to an orphanage in the Romanian town of Cernavoda where they will work with children and young adults with HIV Aids. The annual trip, which takes place in July, is run in conjunction with Nightingales Children’s Project.
This week, the group organised a major fundraising event with pupils washing cars, selling cream teas and hosting a charity auction in the evening. Over the course of the day almost £8,000 was raised. This will fund a play scheme for the orphanage run by the pupils during their 10 day visit. The money will also contribute to specific projects in Cernavoda currently being developed by Nightingales.
Kirsty Glynn, who leads the school trip said: “The pupils do everything for this trip, from raising money to buying resources, packing them up and getting them shipped over to Romania. It’s not the kind of trip where you can just turn up with your suitcase on the day we leave.
“It’s a life-changing trip for the pupils. Most of the children we meet through the project have hugely complex emotional and sometimes behavioural problems. Some are quite severely disabled and many have HIV. Many of our pupils haven’t come into contact with real hardship and poverty before and it’s a humbling experience to meet the children and hear their stories. They also experience a country that is quite close to home and part of the EU but that has real cultural, social and economic problems.”