Blackrock students on Indian adventure

SIX students from Blackrock College are on a six-day, 10,000-mile round trip of a lifetime to Kolkata, India, where they are experiencing what life is like for some of the poorest people in the world.

Liam Quigley, Will Doherty, Matthew O’Driscoll, Oisin O’Reilly, Sebastian McKimm and Marcus Rafferty are all members of the Southside school’s transition year group that ran this year’s annual St Patrick’s Day Badge project in aid of GOAL and Aidlink.

The boys will be the first students from the college to visit some of GOAL’s projects, where they will learn how their money is helping the charity deliver aid to some of India’s most vulnerable members of society.

The popular badges campaign has been running since 1990, raising more than e2 million to assist the poor of the developing world in the process.

“It is only right that after raising this amount of money, over more than 20 years, that some of the Blackrock boys visit a selection of our projects to find out about the people we are continuing to assist,

? explained GOAL’s Development Education Officer, Maeve Seery.

Accompanied by Ms Seery and the college’s transition year coordinator, Christina Nulty, the six boys departed from Dublin airport on Sunday, May 20 and arrived in the East Indian metropolis in the early hours of the following morning. Over the following five days, they visited a number of GOAL’s programmes.

These included the agency’s project to improve living and working conditions for migrant workers at 35 of the city’s brick-making factories, and others for the families living at some of the city’s municipal dump sites.

The group will also spend time at some of the many schools that have benefitted from water, sanitation and hygiene services provided by GOAL, giving the boys an opportunity to interact and play with some of the children.

The lads will also get a chance to do some sightseeing before departing for the return trip to Dublin.

The St Patrick’s Day badges campaign began in 1990 when a group of enterprising students from Blackrock College dreamt up the idea of selling adhesive Shamrocks around St Patrick’s Day in support of GOAL and Aidlink. The students control every aspect of the project, from ordering, distribution and management to advertising and sales.