World challenge expedition- venezuela 2008 need to raise £3500 by selling. help plz!!

ChrisJBarnes

i am going on a world challenge expedition with my school to venezuela in 2008. I am 15 and I need to be able to earn £3500. on the expedition, it is a month and it is basically helping poor people, building things for their school, teaching them english etc. I will also be seeing the whole country and hiking, backpacking for a lot of it. Up hills, stuck in the jungles and deserts cooking for myself and washing in rivers!!! I will be tired afterwards! It is a month long and this is why it costs so much. I will learn valuable skills, including looking after money and leadership on it, and I have to raise the money myself. see https://www.world-challenge.co.uk for more details.

That is where I need your help. i have decided that the best way to do this is from buying wholesale stuff cheaply, and then selling on ebay (I think I am good at it)

Does anyone know any wholesalers or websites where I can buy in bulk cheaply. (Preferably smaller stuff rather than stuff like ovens and microwaves etc.)

Failing that, any other ideas where I can get stuff cheaply or any other ways to make money?

Or if you have £3500 burning a hole in your pocket, I can give you my bank details! :rotfl:

thanks in advance, seriously any help please reply or PM me.

Thanks

Chris Barnes

p.s. if anyone has been on one of these, and can tell me whether it is worthwile or not, I would also like to know!

jyonda

no

Wow Chris, that's a lot of money for just one month. A couple of years ago I spent 3 months in Borneo Scuba diving from boats every day and that didn't cost as much as 3500! My own experience of that project was that whilst being worthwhile to an extent the money would have been better spent on giving directly to an organisation already conducting those works in the region and perhaps I could have looked for something a little closer to home. Some of my co-volunteers became quite dissillusioned that they weren't actually 'saving the world'.
Also IMHO, 15 is a bit young for something like this, not because you won't get anything out of it now but because you may only do something like this once in your life and you will definitely get more out of it later if you can join it up with some backpacking. Maybe before or after Uni. It's also far cheaper to do your own backpacking, though it's good to travel in a structured environment.
It's your money and your decision but be aware that you are basically having an "adventure" holiday and will be geting much more out of it than the local people will.

Good luck.

PS Venezuela is an oil rich socialist state which I'd have thought could afford, and would be motivated to build it's own schools. There are definitely poorer countries in the world.

ChrisJBarnes

cheers for that info. what i perhaps didnt make clear is that it will be after year 13 that i go, I will be 18, and ill have 18 months to raise the money.

ChrisJBarnes

cheers for that info. what i perhaps didnt make clear is that it will be after year 13 that i go, I will be 18, and ill have 18 months to raise the money.

ChrisJBarnes

i appreciate the thing about that other organisations might be better, but i think only about 14 days is helping poor people. other things include trekking and seeing the country. it is definately not a holiday, however it is not all helping people which charities could do better.

jyonda

no

Only 14 days? That's half your trip dude. That's £1750. Give 500 quid to Oxfam and go see the whole world on the remaining £3000 would be my advice. 18 is still a long way off so it doesn't sound like you have to decide right now anyway. Keep your options open and if you still feel like it then start raising the cash nearer the time. I can't actually remember anyone on my 'expedition' who raised a penny other than by working or money from parents.
If you want a challlenge before then there's loads of things you can get involved with and you won't have to go to Venezuela to find them.

rbulph

no

I was in a colonial hill station in Tanzania early this year. The place was littered with empty buildings, left there since the Germans moved on. Many of them were still in good condition, having been built very solidly, as you can imagine. One evening I was surprised to see a group of about twenty young Westerners walking along the road. They explained to me that they were there as volunteers and were building a centre for local women to work in as there was little work available for women locally. Disregarding the question of who was actually going to provide the work for these women in the centre once the volunteers had gone home, which didn't really seem to have been considered as far as I could see, it seemed staggering that they should be going to the trouble of constructing yet another building in a place that already had so many unused buildings. The whole venture seemed incredibly naive. If the volunteers really thought there was a need for a new building in this community, wouldn't it have been better to just send the money and arrange for local labour to produce it?

So I entirely agree with jyonda. You could go to Nepal for a month and have a fantastic time trekking there for £1000 and give the rest to Oxfam. You'd be doing both yourself and the Third World much better service.

Sallys_Savings

no

I totally agree with the other posters.

GiveItBack

That's one of the problems with overseas work. Some people expect charities working abroad to have people on the ground and to send volunteers over, but really the charity has a duty to make the money go as far as possible. Why senda volunteer over when a simple donation oculd go so much further.

Then again, I think the OP would gain more from this trip than from raising the money, and giving most of it to a charity and spending some on a trek.

(There's also the fact that they might not manage to raise it without going on the trip)

ChrisJBarnes

thanks for that. does anyone know about selling tickts on ebay though, looking around you can get fathless tickets for £25, and some of them are going for £100 for 2!!!

ReportInvestor

I've known people who went on this World Challenge and it has benefited them enormously as individuals.

As far as effective charitable work goes, it's not particularly cost effective - in accountant speak. But it's much better than nothing .

But then who knows what those individuals who went on the World Challenge may do for charity in future as a result of a possible life changing experience ?