MyPE

Community Business Directory, Event Listings, News and Views from Gqeberha, Nelson Mandela Bay

Gap Year Girl’s Machete Terror

By

The London Evening Standard recently published an article titled; Gap year girl: My terror as attacker waving machete said he would kill me.

It kinda irks me though, to read this stuff about Port Elizabeth on a foreign web site:

A London student told today of her horror at being attacked by a man wielding a machete during a gap year volunteer mission in South Africa.

Jessica Cremin, 21, feared for her life when she was targeted while waiting outside a church to take children from a crime-ridden town-ship to school.

“It was terrifying,” said Miss Cremin, who was standing with two South African project volunteers in the Walmer area of Port Elizabeth. “The man waved the machete and swung it at me a few times, saying, ‘I’m going to kill you’.

“I was just saying, ‘I’m sorry’. He was shouting things that I couldn’t understand about Princess Diana and Prince Charles and the royal family. He obviously wasn’t happy that a British person was there. We ran and hid in a house. He was parading up and down, shouting he was going to kill us. We were hiding for about an hour. I’ve never been more scared in my life.”

Miss Cremin, from Wandsworth, had been chosen from thousands of applicants for the International Citizen Service’s Lattitude programme.

Miss Cremin, who is on a gap year from her international development degree at the University of East London, was two weeks into a 10-week placement on a project financed by the Department for International Development in the Walmer township.

The attack came three days after armed burglars broke into a fellow volunteer’s home where she was staying in the community.

Miss Cremin flew home three days after the attack, with five fellow British volunteers who said they felt unsafe. They had been helping at a school and a drug and alcohol centre in one of the Eastern Cape’s poorest areas.

The following two tabs change content below.
My Twitter profileMy Facebook profileMy Google+ profileMy LinkedIn profileMy Flickr profileMy Pinterest profile

Alan Straton

Chief Cook, Bottle Washer and Broom Mechanic at MyPE
Passionate about Port Elizabeth and definitely NOT packing for Perth. Alan's ethos is epitomised in the words of Nelson Mandela; "I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society. If need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." See more articles by Alan.