Warwick students hitch-hike for charity

Eighty-six Warwick students hitchhiked to Morocco and Prague over the Easter holiday as part of the annual Warwick Hitch.

The Hitch event has been taking place at Warwick since 1992, and raises money for the charity Link Community Development, which works to promote the development of education systems in impoverished regions of Africa. Since last October, Hitch has raised £16,769 towards their goal of £30,100 by the end of June.

Each hitchhiker must raise £350 for the charity, which they achieve through activities such as bagging groceries at Costcutter or organising sports tournaments.

The Warwick Hitch event is part of a larger nationwide event organised by Link Community Development. This year, students from 16 UK universities, including Warwick, participated. Link Community Development’s website states that “health and safety on the Hitch are paramount,” and has a number of measures in place to ensure the safety of participants.

Hitchhikers are required to have an emergency contact in the UK, have travel insurance, and phone or text the organisers daily.

The students are divided into teams of two and three, and there must be at least one male student on each team, “for safety reasons,” according to the website.

This year’s Warwick Hitch organisers, Mannie Taur, Isobel Tarr, and Jason Snow, told the Boar, “all [Warwick Hitch participants] reached their intended destination … with no reported major incidents, which is a good demonstration of the safety precautions we have in place.”

This year’s Hitch attracted twenty more participants than last year’s, which the organisers say “is a very good progress, showing Warwick students are getting more and more interested in the event. We are looking forward to bringing more people on board next year.”

Hitch participants agreed that it was a positive experience. “I decided to participate all in the name of fun,” said Allen Chua, a first year economics student. He also wanted to go “to a whole new country, getting transport without paying a cent.”

Chua said the experience was “good overall” but that merchants in Morocco were “really pushy because it was so touristy. They were trying to sell us their products and we didn’t really like that.”

He also said that, although his group “met some dodgy people along the way, it turned out fine—looks can be deceiving.”

“It was really different to anywhere I’d been before. Massive chaos but fun,” said David Greaves, another participant. “Basically, the feeling you get when you’ve been standing there for hours and a car pulls up is amazing.”