Fiji Adventure

Below follows an article from the Perthshire Courier & Advertiser in July 2005. A full report on the Fiji trip will follow at a later date.

"A Summer Holiday with a difference awaits 17-year-old Edward Wotherspoon from Inverness. Edward, who has just completed his education as a boarder at Edinburgh’s Merchiston Castle School, and who hopes to take up a place at Durham University in September to read Economics, has volunteered to spend five weeks of the holiday in faraway Fiji. However he won’t be lying on the beach and soaking up the sun.

Instead he will take part in Merchiston’s Fiji project, now in its fifth year, which will involve fifteen pupils and two members of staff working in the village of Wailevu on the south coast of Vanua Levu, one of the Fijian. Here they will set out to refurbish three classrooms of the local district primary school, including the replacement of the roof, repairing the walls and painting both the exterior and interior of the building.

When ‘off duty’, there will be no 5 star hotel either. Throughout their stay the pupils will live with families in the nearby village of Dreketi and will be treated very much as one of the locals.

“It will obviously put me into an environment completely different to anything I’ve previously experienced,” says Edward. “The added appeal is that there should be a great sense of achievement when we complete what is obviously a very worthwhile project.”

And as previous projects in Fiji have seen Merchiston boys, in their leisure time, competing with both a Fijian choir in church and a Fijian team on a rugby field, it seems likely that Edward is in for a lively, as well as rewarding, time!"