Coll-based charity, Project Trust, gets higher than ever application rate for gap year work

The charity, Project Trust, based on Argyll’s Isle of Coll, has had higher than ever numbers of applications this year from school leavers for the life-changing experience of a gap year working abroad with the Trust.

Already the office in Coll is swamped with communications from this year’s 185 successful applicants as they find their feet in new places around the world.

In India volunteers are getting used to living on a bamboo houseboat; discovering that the normal experience of a trip to the cinema requires getting involved in communal cheering and booing; and being awestruck at an Indian bridegroom’s arrival at the ceremony on an elephant. (Although if they’d watched Coronation Street they’d already have seen this happening in darkest Manchester.)

In Honduras, one volunteer in early difficulty with the language convulsed her primary school class when she asked: ‘Who’s stolen the biscuit from my desk?’ Instead of using the word ‘galleta’ for biscuit, she’d said ‘guillina’, which means chicken.

The cost of a volunteer’s year working abroad with Project Trust is £5,000, half of what it would cost them to stay in the UK for that time, estoimated at £10,000.