Duke of Edinburgh Gold: Mauritius 2007

Last year, as part of our Duke of Edinburgh Gold requirement, we were supposed to go to Mauritius for a 4-day 3-night expedition and a residential project. We were scheduled to work with a school for the physically and mentally handicapped children in a town in the south of the island called Maheborg. Unfortunately, our plans were brought to an abrupt halt when the trip was cancelled due to an outbreak of Chikungunya on the island (the DAY before we were supposed to fly!!). Over the course of the year, we had raised about Dhs. 20,000 in order to pay for some of the work we'd be doing at the Maheborg school (they needed a wall to be broken, tools to be bought, a fence to be put up etc.) but as we weren't ever able to fly, we felt that rather than sitting on the money, we'd donate it to the school such that they'd still be able to get that work done.

The trip was rescheduled for this year (although we were assigned another school to help). Again, over the course of the school year, we raised money through various means (mostly through cake bale sales - though why they're called that when we made the biggest profit off Pizzas and Hot Dogs is besides me - and helping out at the school's Fete). For the first week, we were in Maheborg carrying out our project with the school. The school was setup by a woman called Madame Pascal and it was near a sugarcane plantation (Mauritius is literally COVERED with plantations as we unfortunately found out during our expedition!) and was mainly for children of the farmers. Unfortunately, it's severely underfunded and understaffed and unfortunately few farmer parents feel the need to send their children to school.

For the first day, Madame Pascal (or simply Pascal as she preferred us to call her) introduced us to the school and gave us a little insight into the problems it faces - for example, she mentioned how several women have their children extremely young (13, 14 typically) and hence are pretty much girls themselves with few parenting skills to bring up a child properly - and so many children often come to school without having brushed their teeth or taken a bath or even just washed up! So the first thing she does in the morning is ask each kid whether they've brushed and bathed and if not, they're sent with one of the teachers (or maid) to do so - the real sad part was that all these kids (about 20) shared one toothbrush! Walking around the rooms of the school, the whole place was quite drab (almost depressing), the walls were simply whitewashed, the fence was severely rusted and nothing on the outside was protected against the weather (whilst we were there, there were showers that lasted anywhere from a couple of seconds to a few hours!).

So we began to plan and in the end, after 4 days of extremely hard work, we had painted the entire place (2 rooms, the back and one fantastically gorgeous mural), scrapped the rust off their fence poles and added a nice thick new coat of oil-based paint to protect against weathering, cut waist high grass (with a sickle and shears - anything else wasn't available cheaply) and cleared an ecosystem and mold from the roof (which was eating into the roof, causing holes and leaks). Absolutely fantastic (once I upload the pictures - see below - you can see the difference we made from the before and after shots we took!).

We had raised so much money that after all this painting, we still had enough to:

• Buy tools for another handicapped school in another town called Goodlands. This school makes a lot of its own equipment as well as some handicrafts which they sell to raise funds. Prior to our trip, they had only one set of quite basic tools that they shared with their branch in Maheborg. So we had a presentation where we handed over a large array of power tools and it was just amazing to see how happy they all were (we had raised all these funds from bake sales and I had made sure to price everything at highly extortionate prices which drew criticism from everyone but this made it all worth it!)
• Buy toothbrushes (they no longer have only one :D), towels (we had used their existing towels as rags to mop up our painting mess!), books and other assorted equipment for Mme. Pascal's school
• Put down concrete and an awning for shade over a gravelly area at her school to create a new playground for the pre-primary children.
• Build an access ramp for a third school on the island!

When we weren't at the project, we were living in a ho(s)tel called Coco Villas which was quite a decent place .They had a nice coffee/lounge room which we pretty much took over (being the largest group of guests there) and it had a good sound system, a pool table (which I owned!!...not!) and where we ate dinner (home cooked by the family who runs the place by far some of the best food we'd eaten). At this time, I had also held some hope that I'd get through the piles of work set for us and so decided to skip a few visits to the beach and snorkeling (a decision I'm annoyed at now considering how little work I managed to get done overall!!)

The next 4 days (and 3 nights) were spent on our expedition and this was HELL. We were walking about 20km a day (starting at 9am and finishing about 5-7pm!) with only a compass and a 25-yr old map to guide us and carrying all our equipment for the entire expedition. Although I say it was HELL, looking back, I did enjoy myself and it's a great feeling of achievement to know that you lived through it all! Personally, I was very lucky, we'd bought a good bag, a good sleeping bag and an excellent pair of boots (Timberland!) and so I was one of two lucky people who did not get blisters by the end (albeit on the last day, I WAS hobbling around like a cripple - somehow my body knew there would be no more crazy walking and all muscles cramped at once!).

The first day was pretty ok, the navigation wasn't too hard (except since it was the first day and we hadn't done this in 2 years, we were a bit nervous). We did get lost once but were able to course correct pretty well. At one point we also (stupidly) cut straight through the sugarcane and I ended up with fine splinters down the index finger of my right hand (extremely painful!!). As we found out on the first day, the sugarcane was by far the worst part of the walk. THe sugarcane would be about 8 foot high, obscuring much of the surroundings with straight paths cutting through the fields. So if you were to choose a wrong path (as we did!) you would end up walking for miles before you'd realize you'd gone wrong.

The second and third days were pretty difficult. The first leg of the second day was a beautiful walk along the coast (many pictures taken) but it was so long (something like 7km straight) that we began to worry we were lost, we called one of the teachers only to find the checkpoint some 10 footsteps away! One of my team mates started to develop extremely painful blisters on all toes and up high thighs so by the end of the 2nd day we were walking at under 1kmph (but we made it!). On the 3rd day, he was in even more pain and had to drop out of one of the legs because he started to retch (that definitely killed the mood for that leg - a leg which was 11km uphill with no checkpoints/rest stops/water drops in between at midday!!). However, once we reached the penultimate checkpoint, he seemed to have recovered after one of the staff (a former SAS :o!) pumped him with sugar (through bread and a strong sweet tea) and gave him a Pepsi (he definitely perked up after that - to the point where we all thought his illness was his body's shock at not having a soft drink in over two days!)

The final day was great, we were walking at a pace faster than we'd ever walked before and easily overtook all the groups.... and then we took a wrong turn. As I said before, our map was 25-years old, the routes of sugarcane (and other paths) had changed significantly and so when we hit a most crucial junction (that had a three way fork - whereas on the map, only a two-way was shown and so we though, stupidly, "this isn't it!") we went straight instead of left. We ended up at the NEXT TOWN along the coast and had to walk an EXTRA 7km back to the bus!! What was amazing was even though we did this extra walk, we were only an hour late (so we must've blazed the first part of the day... like a teacher said, we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory!!)

The final three days were a hard-earned rest in the tourist destination of the island - Grand Baie. When we reached the hotel, we pretty much collapsed onto their garden furniture and emptied their freezer of all their soft drinks (I wish someone had taken a picture at that point, the tables were literally COVERED with glass bottles - I had something like 3/4 Fantas when usually I can hardly down 1!!) After everyone had lengthy showers (and phone calls to parents - "OMG we're alive" - were made) we headed out to a steakhouse to eat for 4-days worth! We also graced an Italian place called Luigi's (though we were disappointed to learn that the manager's name was Lindsey, even though he looked like a Luigi), the steakhouse (Spurs) and a Chinese place (Hong Kong Palace - which served a great selection of Chinese at a ludicrously cheap price!)

Our second day at Grand Baie was spent at a place called Ile Aux Surfs which was essentially a beach island where people went to laze around and do water sports. Many of us in the group went parasailing (I was annoyed at how fast it was - although we paid for a "Long Trip" of 10 mins, we got a 3 minute ride with the guy claiming that the winds were to blame - I had a better parasailing experience in Dubai!) and tubing (where you sit ass down in a circular inflated ring and are dragged behind a boat at HIGH speeds!), both were insanely fun.

Overall, perhaps the best school trip I have ever been on, extremely memorable (and definitely a fitting finish to high school - we break up in 7 weeks for ever and ever!!). I've put my pictures up on Facebook (friend me on there if you want to take a look). Once I figure out how to mass upload pictures from OS X to Vox, I'll put up a collection here too.

Update: I decided to switch to Windows for a while and use the XP file uploader. *Makes a note to file for a iPhoto exporter* so here's a collection (with the post peppered with some more):