Jamie Bentley's Travel Page
Sri Lankan Diary Tanzanian Diary Indian Diary Australian Diary
Before Sri Lanka After Sri Lanka This is I, Jamie Bentley, welcome to my world!! The aim of this
page is to make people aware of my endeavour and originally intended to inspire people to donate to my cause and to thank those who did donate . I am now committed to a new extended elective program at the university of Dundee where I will be spending 4 months helping to provide and learning about healthcare at Kamuzu Central Hospital in Lilongwe, Malawi. Read my Malawi Diary to find out what's going on. It all started in 2002 when I worked in Sri Lanka for 5 months as a volunteer for the Scottish charity (No 22028) Link Overseas Exchange. My partner for this trip was Perth lad Craig Loudon, who had just finished a successful University career in Economics. In Sri Lanka Craig and I were at the CCFC project, Hewadiwala that is in the middle of jungle between Kandy and Colombo and near Rambukkana (the train station for Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage), and there we were dealing with over 300 children of various ages. We took part in many projects from the Education Programme, to improve the education of children and thus develop the families and increase their job prospects therefore raising family poverty. After I had returned home to go to University I helped re-found a University society called Development and Research Expeditions (DARE). DARE is a student run society project that basically arranges summer placements in developing countries that vary from simply helping out to developing DARE funded projects. In the summer of 2004 I went to Kituo cha Watoto Yatima na Wenye Shida (Home for Orphans and Children with Problems) near Iringa in South Tanzania with 6 other Dundee students; David Adey-viscuso, Mark Anderson, Clare Bleakley, Isabelle Hancock and Laura Winter. There is a short Tanzanian Diary page with pictures and some details of what I did. During the summer of 2005 I had another DARE trip, this time returning to India with 8 other students. This time I'm going to the other side to help rebuild Puritigadda, a village affected by the Tsunami in December, which is situated on the east coast of India in the Andra Pradesh state. My next adventure (summer 2006) was to go to Broome, Western Austrlia on a solo mission to work in a Broome Rural Aboriginal Service. I was well supported by many people and raised all the money I needed and so the function of this page has changed slightly. I have introduced a diary page which I have now stopped adding to. This page will now, I hope, inspire those to take a gap year like mine, also show charities how beneficial time like this is and encourage them to sponsor others. I realise the page is riddled with mistakes, that's Sri Lanka for you, many computers didn't work properly, you got aggravated by them and made a lot of typing errors. I hope you all enjoy this page as much as I enjoyed my time. My benefactors can be seen on my donors and links page. You can also visit The Saga Continues to see pictures of exactly what I did to raise the money, and on the Sri Lankan diary you can see read about and see pictures of my time in Asia. Please sign my guestbook, and donate as much as you can to my project. Thank You!
