‘This work experience has been invaluable’

At 18 Bella Pavitt is the youngest volunteer that the association of volunteer interpreters in the Axarquía (Avisa) has had. She decided to start volunteering at the health centre in her home town of Nerja after passing her A Levels at the British School of Malaga in summer 2025.

Bella knows that she wants to study Chemistry and follow a career either as a doctor or at least in the medical profession: “As I wanted to go into a science degree, being able to get this work experience has been invaluable. It has given me great insight into a health care setting and fortified my desire to do something related to medicine and heath.” She adds that “it is really lovely to help and give back something to the community”.

Although Bella is considerably younger than the other volunteers, she says the patients “always seem really grateful” and she finds that they “appreciate the fact that I have grown up in Spain”.

One of the most important aspects of working in health care that Bella has learned she says is developing the skills needed to help people who are in difficult and stressful situations: “It’s just really nice to be able to help people, especially with the elderly if they are on their own. Being able to calm them down – when you are older you tend to forget, so being there and being able to get all of their questions answered helps them.”

In her experience Bella says the doctors are “always really sweet. They are trying to do their job and want the patients to understand what’s going on, they are always grateful that we are there to help”.

She’s very grateful to the other volunteers who have shown her the ropes and helped to settle in with the role. “I was really lucky because I started volunteering with Mila and Jane, they really showed me how to do everything and where everyone and everything was,” Bella says, adding: “You can tell that they genuinely like to help others. It’s really inspirational.”

It’s not all easy though and Bella admits that sometimes when patients come in and they don’t have the documents they need, especially tourists who turn up without a passport of global health card, she points out that “at the end of the day we’re just interpreters. We’re not really there to help with the bureaucratic side there’s nothing we can do unless it’s a genuine emergency”.

Nine time out of 10 she says it’s fine, but “there’s always that one person who forgets”. The other aspect of the work that can be challenging is when “the topic is sensitive. You can’t get emotionally involved and you just have to give the facts that the doctor is explaining, but of course you have to be sensitive.” Bella says that this year of volunteering has been “great training” for her future career as she looks forward to heading to the UK to start her university life there.

Bella works one day a week and fits it around bar work to save money for the “expensive” university fees in the UK. When she’s not working or volunteering she says she is either doing sport, or “reading around the subject” through articles and studies in journals like the New Scientist or The Royal Society of Chemistry.

She’s particularly interested in chemistry and pharmaceuticals but says there are all sorts of different paths that Chemistry opens up, including sustainability. “There’s so much you can do with Chemistry,” she says.

Bella and her family moved from Buckinghamshire to Nerja shortly before Bella’s eighth birthday. She explains that they had family in the town and were familiar with it and the Spanish lifestyle. “I think my parents wanted to spend more time with me and my brother and they preferred the lifestyle, they wanted us to grow up in a nice environment and we already had family here, so that definitely helped,” she told SUR in English.

Bella went to a public Spanish primary school and remembers not speaking the language when she started. She also remembers the Spanish system being “very different” from the British one and that referring to her teachers by their first name rather than their surname was “a bit of a shock”. While the Axarquía has seen a growth in the number of foreign pupils in its schools in recent years, at the time Bella says she was “the only foreign kid” in her class.

Now, on the verge of going back to the UK to live for the first time since she was a child, she says “I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s like at uni”.

Bella also admits that with family mainly all based in Nerja, she hasn’t gone back to the UK much at all in the past 10 years, apart from for a summer programme at the University of Oxford two years ago.

About the weather in Scotland, where she is planning to go to university, Bella laughs, “I’m going to suffer”, but adds, “At least they have Marks & Spencer in the UK, That’s a positive.”

If anyone needs an interpreter at the Nerja health centre this summer, they are definitely in good hands and with the opportunities that studying Chemistry opens up and the fact that she speaks Spanish and English fluently, the world is her oyster. Best of luck Bella!