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Travel with a heart

Sue Hoban

06Mar07

AROUND-THE-WORLD trips can often throw up life-changing experiences but Manly marketing consultant Jane Gavel had absolutely no forewarning of the twist her life was to take when she set off five years ago.

Instead of the usual working holiday in London, her trip stalled on the first leg and she didn't make it past South America.

But she has a lot to show for the time she has spent there. With her partner, Selvy Ugaz, she is the co-founder of Peru's Challenge, a non-profit travel company that can claim credit for improving the lives of about 1000 Peruvian children.

In four years it has built schools, provided food, organised community health initiatives and taught skills to women in poor communities in the Andes. All its work has been funded by the ``voluntourists'' who pay for a combined travel and volunteering experience with the charity.

``If anyone had told me when I was getting on the plane for South America that I was going to stay there and start up a charity I would have laughed at them,'' Jane Gavel said during a short trip back to Australia last week.

Backed by her experience working in marketing for Tourism NSW, she devised the travel concept that underpins Peru's Challenge's charity work. It helps poor communities in a region of Peru where only 15 per cent of children attend school, unemployment stands at 74 per cent and life expectancy is 41.

It gives clients a travel experience that combines tours of the ``the real Peru'', Spanish lessons and volunteering work on education, health or hygiene projects.

``Selvy has always wanted to do something to help his people but also to show tourists the real side of Peru,'' Jane Gavel said.

``My idea was to develop the sort of program I would have wanted - seeing the sights, having a good time, learning a bit of Spanish but also seeing the reality of what Peru is all about.''

She said she had left for South America with a slightly skewed notion of what lay ahead. ``I imagined I would be sitting in the back of trucks with the local people and their chickens but it wasn't like that,'' she said. ``The transport was easy, many of the people spoke English and there was accommodation everywhere. That's why I decided to stay a bit longer.''

Jane Gavel, now 29, can pinpoint the experience that convinced her there was another side of Peru and that she could, and should, stay to do something to help.

At the time, her partner Selvy was working with special needs children for another charity in the Sacred Valley. ``They're seen as the `devil's children' because people think they are cursed, so they are often hidden away'' Ms Gavel said. ``One day Selvy asked me to take one of the boys, Jose, home. We walked through an iron gate and walked into a chook pen full of mud, pigs, hens. Disgusting. I asked Jose, `Where are we going?' and he said, `My house. My house'. At the back there was a little open area that was his house, with a blanket on the floor, no water, no electricity nothing else. He would be chained up and his aunt would get him drunk so he wouldn't cry out. Once you have seen something like that you can't walk away.''

She said Jose now lived in a room built for him in one of the schools the charity had built and worked there looking after the chickens and the horses.

Ms Gavel said Peru's Challenge worked closely with local communities for two to three years, ensuring all its projects were sustainable and could be maintained by the local communities after it moved on to help another village.

``Once we have built the school and shown results so the community trust us, we then start working on education levels,'' she said. ``The year we started the education department had closed down 600 rural schools. We went them and said, we'll prove to you there are more than 100 kids here so we ran a summer school and got 150 kids attending so they couldn't say no to us. We sign three-year contracts with them where we agree to provide salaries for three teachers the first year and they provide three; then the next year we do two, they do four; then the next year we'll do one and they do five so that way it's sustainable.''

Jane Gavel, who grew up on a farm near Coonabarabran, said the past four years had been both exhausting and rewarding.

``Sometimes I question myself and say to Selvy, `What are we doing. It's so hard and is it all worth it?' But then you see a child who's been accepted in to a course they didn't think they could ever do, or you see a mother who is so happy because her kids are going to school or even just a smile from the kids and it just makes it all worthwhile.''

Peru's Challenge: http://www.peruschallenge.com/