A friend of mine who edits a student newspaper sent me this...
Ok so the article appears to be written by a ranting 'Guardianista' but is there a grain of truth in there?
Did you have a gap year and was it worth it? I didn't.
Bloody hell I wish I was somewhere hot and remote now
Tanya Gold
The Guardian, Thursday 6 November 2008
Article history
The number of teenagers taking gap years has shrunk, like a wildebeest's watering-hole in a drought. It's the credit crunch, growing more silvery linings by the day. And this pleases me. I don't like to see posh teenagers doing misery tourism and returning with batik trousers and malaria. (Because they are too stupid to take malaria pills and wear non-batik trousers.)
Affluent European adolescents used to do the Grand Tour. They went to Italy to admire the art. Now they go to Africa to admire the shit. Gap years are moral imperialism. It's a year-long narcissism party, where the gap-yearers use Africans and South Americans and Indians as props in the movie of their own wonderfulness. They want to have a "caring experience". So they invade slums and orphanages and shanty towns. They turn up with teeth like brand-new fridges and shout, "Let's build a waterslide, guys!" Then they disappear back to Oxford or Exeter or the LSE. It's rare that they do anything useful.
Developing countries have labour already. They don't need ours. The carbon cost of flying 200,000 British adolescents long-haul each year will one day put the mud huts they build under water. Many charities privately admit they are a waste of space.
And doesn't the developing world have enough to grieve it without Cambridge University students poncing around looking caring, having Jesus Christ moments, before buggering back home to spend a lifetime exploiting it? "Look," the gap-yearers go, eyeballs spinning, "The Poor. We must help The Poor by building them a mud hut they could have built themselves and giving them a Kit-Kat." Cue photograph of gap-yearer helping Poor, to illustrate good qualities on Facebook page.
How do I know this? Read the websites for gap-year students commenting on their disappointing experiences. They clog up the internet with their whining.
"No one met me at the airport!" they squeal, shivering back in Epsom, or Guildford, or Penge, texting each other on their mobile telephones made of Congolese minerals and blood. "There was no breakfast! Strange things came out my arse!"
They seemed to have confused their gap year with staying at the Marriott Hotel - Slum and Shanty Branch, Dumpsville. They thought their experience of helping The Poor would be better. More fun. More Club 18-30, less Club I Died By the Age of Five Because There Isn't Any Medicine Here, You Fool. They don't seem to realise that The Poor live in squalor because they are - well - poor. While the economy melts around their ears, the Dolce e Gabbana missionaries will be staying at home this year.
I live above Oxfam and I like it. I feel as if I am sitting on the head of a saint. And every evening, and on Sundays, the good, liberal people of Hampstead come and leave bin bags outside full of discarded knickers and jigsaws and crockery. "I feel terrible that the poor black children of Africa are starving," they think, drawing up in their rhino-repellent 4x4s, in their enormous diamond rings and £500 lee-sure suits, before popping off to eat risotto and commit adultery with their psychotherapists under very expensive duvets.
"Here is a secondhand breadbin and a bra and a faulty piece of electrical equipment."
But there is trouble in risotto-land. A month ago I was letting myself into my flat, and I saw a man in a Mercedes draw up. He parked, walked over to the bin bags, ripped them open, and started helping himself. I stomped up to him and squeaked self-righteously. What are you doing? Don't you know that is the property of the poorest people on Earth? The ones who are days away from death? The man looked at me. He was tall and ugly and he had the eyes of a killer. Actually, he is a killer because one 50 pence item donated to Oxfam pays for several days' supply of baby milk. And he opened his ugly mouth and he lied:
"I give stuff to Oxfam all the time." And he drove off in his Mercedes, on his way to hell, presumably via a house full of stolen goods on Bishops Avenue, a street where no house has fewer than 11 bathrooms.
I was so surprised that I established a what-is-happening-to-Oxfam-goods patrol. I stand by my window, between the pot plant and the telephone, and observe the crime scene. And I have learned that was not an isolated incident. It is an epidemic. The good, liberal people of Hampstead come, rip the bags open and pilfer. They do it on their way to Le Caprice, and the City, and a night at the opera. I see teenagers, housewives and businessman, helping themselves to thongs. And it pains my good, liberal heart. What can I do? I have begun to drag the bin bags into my downstairs hallway overnight, to rescue them. One of my neighbours - a real man-monster - doesn't even steal the stuff. He simply hurls it into the road. I ask him why. "It blocks my entrance," he says. But what about the poor starving children? "Charity begins at home," he says. No, it doesn't, I say. "Fuck off," he says.
I call Oxfam HQ. I explain the situation to a nice man. Any comment? The nice man pauses. "Bastards," he says.
Ok so the article appears to be written by a ranting 'Guardianista' but is there a grain of truth in there?
Did you have a gap year and was it worth it? I didn't.
Bloody hell I wish I was somewhere hot and remote now
Tanya Gold
The Guardian, Thursday 6 November 2008
Article history
The number of teenagers taking gap years has shrunk, like a wildebeest's watering-hole in a drought. It's the credit crunch, growing more silvery linings by the day. And this pleases me. I don't like to see posh teenagers doing misery tourism and returning with batik trousers and malaria. (Because they are too stupid to take malaria pills and wear non-batik trousers.)
Affluent European adolescents used to do the Grand Tour. They went to Italy to admire the art. Now they go to Africa to admire the shit. Gap years are moral imperialism. It's a year-long narcissism party, where the gap-yearers use Africans and South Americans and Indians as props in the movie of their own wonderfulness. They want to have a "caring experience". So they invade slums and orphanages and shanty towns. They turn up with teeth like brand-new fridges and shout, "Let's build a waterslide, guys!" Then they disappear back to Oxford or Exeter or the LSE. It's rare that they do anything useful.
Developing countries have labour already. They don't need ours. The carbon cost of flying 200,000 British adolescents long-haul each year will one day put the mud huts they build under water. Many charities privately admit they are a waste of space.
And doesn't the developing world have enough to grieve it without Cambridge University students poncing around looking caring, having Jesus Christ moments, before buggering back home to spend a lifetime exploiting it? "Look," the gap-yearers go, eyeballs spinning, "The Poor. We must help The Poor by building them a mud hut they could have built themselves and giving them a Kit-Kat." Cue photograph of gap-yearer helping Poor, to illustrate good qualities on Facebook page.
How do I know this? Read the websites for gap-year students commenting on their disappointing experiences. They clog up the internet with their whining.
"No one met me at the airport!" they squeal, shivering back in Epsom, or Guildford, or Penge, texting each other on their mobile telephones made of Congolese minerals and blood. "There was no breakfast! Strange things came out my arse!"
They seemed to have confused their gap year with staying at the Marriott Hotel - Slum and Shanty Branch, Dumpsville. They thought their experience of helping The Poor would be better. More fun. More Club 18-30, less Club I Died By the Age of Five Because There Isn't Any Medicine Here, You Fool. They don't seem to realise that The Poor live in squalor because they are - well - poor. While the economy melts around their ears, the Dolce e Gabbana missionaries will be staying at home this year.
I live above Oxfam and I like it. I feel as if I am sitting on the head of a saint. And every evening, and on Sundays, the good, liberal people of Hampstead come and leave bin bags outside full of discarded knickers and jigsaws and crockery. "I feel terrible that the poor black children of Africa are starving," they think, drawing up in their rhino-repellent 4x4s, in their enormous diamond rings and £500 lee-sure suits, before popping off to eat risotto and commit adultery with their psychotherapists under very expensive duvets.
"Here is a secondhand breadbin and a bra and a faulty piece of electrical equipment."
But there is trouble in risotto-land. A month ago I was letting myself into my flat, and I saw a man in a Mercedes draw up. He parked, walked over to the bin bags, ripped them open, and started helping himself. I stomped up to him and squeaked self-righteously. What are you doing? Don't you know that is the property of the poorest people on Earth? The ones who are days away from death? The man looked at me. He was tall and ugly and he had the eyes of a killer. Actually, he is a killer because one 50 pence item donated to Oxfam pays for several days' supply of baby milk. And he opened his ugly mouth and he lied:
"I give stuff to Oxfam all the time." And he drove off in his Mercedes, on his way to hell, presumably via a house full of stolen goods on Bishops Avenue, a street where no house has fewer than 11 bathrooms.
I was so surprised that I established a what-is-happening-to-Oxfam-goods patrol. I stand by my window, between the pot plant and the telephone, and observe the crime scene. And I have learned that was not an isolated incident. It is an epidemic. The good, liberal people of Hampstead come, rip the bags open and pilfer. They do it on their way to Le Caprice, and the City, and a night at the opera. I see teenagers, housewives and businessman, helping themselves to thongs. And it pains my good, liberal heart. What can I do? I have begun to drag the bin bags into my downstairs hallway overnight, to rescue them. One of my neighbours - a real man-monster - doesn't even steal the stuff. He simply hurls it into the road. I ask him why. "It blocks my entrance," he says. But what about the poor starving children? "Charity begins at home," he says. No, it doesn't, I say. "Fuck off," he says.
I call Oxfam HQ. I explain the situation to a nice man. Any comment? The nice man pauses. "Bastards," he says.
