This made me chuckle, from the sheer audacity of it. My niece (14) was briefly excited about the possibility of a school trip to Costa Rica, which had been proposed in a presentation to the students by some starter business. I get the impression it had an insipid "Hey gang!" energy to it. Naturally it raised immediate suspicions, because I remember my most extravagent school trip when I was a kid was a drizzly week staying in a disused army barracks in Hornsea.
Anyway, the proposal was that kids who wanted to go to Costa Rica should raise £4500 by the summer, which would then allow them to spend four weeks painting fences, building houses and doing general DIY for under-priveleged Costa Ricans. If the prospect of paying £4500 to be shipped off for a month's manual labour seems insurmountable (and bear in mind this school is in a particularly impoverished area of the north), not to worry! They suggested that students simply needed to start their own independent business to raise the funds, using the example of some hypothetical boy who made a fortune from selling herbal tea.
My niece was apparently quite enthusiastic about it at first, having heard Costa Rica (she later admitted she has no idea where it is) and then giving no consideration to the rest of it. But my sister pointed out to her that they have big spiders over there, which dimmed her enthusiasm, and then suggested that if by some miracle of business flair she somehow managed to raise £4500 by June, she could use that money to do
literally anything else.
She has decided not to go to Costa Rica.
