Education Studies student, Jess, went on a journey of a lifetime to Peru with the BCU Go Abroad programme. Jess spent two weeks helping a small community, building stairs and educating women about their health. Check out Jess’ video to hear how the experience changed her views and benefited her degree.
The two weeks I spent in Peru working in partnership with Medlife were unforgettable and life-changing. I’m so thankful for the incredible opportunity. My time in Peru was so eye-opening and really enabled me to see life from a different perspective. It's not until you actually see poverty in real life that you realise the true scale of it, and how it impacts the lives of the people living in these conditions.
We are so lucky to live the life we do and seeing people living in the slums without things I myself often take for granted, such as running water or electricity, has honestly changed me as a person. The people living in these communities were so inspiring, welcoming us into their homes and it was an honour to help build staircases in their communities, for them to improve accessibility and enable them to achieve land title.
Many of the communities we visited were very high up, and a lot of the houses were on steep terrain. We built these staircases from scratch and worked in partnership with the people living in the communities to build them, it was time-consuming and very physically demanding, but the end result was so rewarding. You could see just how much of an impact these staircases had on the people living in the communities, they were so thankful for our help.
Working in the mobile medical clinics is unlike anything I have done before, it just shows that preventative, possibly life-saving healthcare can be administered without the technology we are lucky enough to have in the UK.
As an Education Studies student, it was incredible to see the significant impact that educating women living in the communities about subjects they were not so aware of, such as signs of cervical cancer and how to perform breast exams, had on them.
I’m so thankful for the incredible opportunity and I look forward to working with Medlife again in the future and sharing the Medlife mission with staff and students at Birmingham City University.