Jessica tastes poverty to fund Peru trip (From Messenger Newspapers)

Jessica tastes poverty to fund Peru trip

11:02am Friday 11th January 2013 in News By Rick Bowen

A TIMPERLEY student is appealing to Messenger readers to help her carry out voluntary work in poverty stricken Peru.

Jessica Chadwick, from Victoria Road, will begin a four month placement in the country in February. To meet some of the expenses of the trip the 18-year-old is to spend five days living on just £1 a day.

Funds raised from the Living Below The Poverty Line Challenge be used to pay for a range of essentials, including resources to aid her work with youngsters in Trujillo on behalf of the charity Supporting Kids in Peru (SKIP).

Jessica was offered the placement as part of her social work degree course at York University and said living conditions are a world away from the UK.

She said: “ A lot of families are living in dire poverty and the place I’m working in is nothing you’ve ever seen in the UK in terms of the facilities. The video I’ve seen is quite shocking.

When I go there I’ll be working with older children on the youth project and it covers all different things, like helping them with their behaviour and their homework. They have a very poor education system over there. They just copy out of books and they don’t really have a very challenging programme for education - that’s one of the massive problems.”

Jessica has come face to face with extreme poverty before. When she was a pupil at Loreto Grammar School in Altrincham she did voluntary work in Calcutta and saw people living in “unbelievable circumstances.”

She said: “That’s kind of preparing me for what I’m going to see when I’m in Peru.”

* Jessica will begin the Living Below The Poverty Line Challenge on January 28 and anyone interested in sponsoring her should e-mail jchad1994@gmail.com