IN life, Catherine Bullen was a bright and hardworking student whose ambition was to become a doctor.

Ten years after her death in the African bush, aged 22, she is still the guiding light for the West Mersea organisation charity set up to carry out the work she never had the chance to start.

The Catherine Bullen Foundation, started by her parents Roger and Linda, has raised thousands to help some of the poorest people in Namibia – the country where she died while on safari in August, 2002.

Catherine, a pupil at Colchester County High School for Girls, knew exactly where her career path lay.

Focused since the age of ten on becoming a GP, she excelled at school and won a place at Bristol University reading medicine. She was one of the top students of her year.

It was a fifth-year elective placement that took her and her best friend, Stephanie Chalmers, to Africa.

Mum Linda said: “She came bouncing in one day and said she wanted to do her placement in Tanzania and Zambia.

“She wanted to see the contrasts in medical care.”

When in remote Oshivelo, Catherine suffered a virulent attack of gastoenteritis and desperately needed lifesaving aid. It could not to be found.

Despite Stephanie’s valiant efforts, Catherine died, leaving a void in the lives of her parents, brother Leigh, sister Kim and the rest of her family.

The idea to set up a charity came after her funeral, where more than £5,000 was received in donations.

Dad Roger said: “We felt we had to do something to carry on her legacy.”

Linda said: “That is when we thought: ‘Should we do something here or in Namibia?’ “Catherine had written such a wonderful travel log and, to us both, it shone through that it was where she wanted us to go.”

Catherine had mentioned that water was the theme of the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg.

That is how a water borehole for the Omuhaturua Primary School in Otjimanangombe, eastern Namibia, became the launch project for what was then the Catherine Bullen Memorial Fund.

Thanks to donations and fundraising, it was followed in 2008 by the construction of a £100,000 medical clinic in the village and the donation of a £22,000 ambulance.

The opening of a kitchen and seating area at the primary school hostel brought the total raised by the charity to £200,000.

Now the Bullens want to raise £92,000 for a dormitory project for the primary school at Eiseb, a village 170km from Otjimanangombe.

Roger, of Colchester Road, West Mersea, said: “Because Catherine had gone to Namibia and died there, we went there.

“When we go back, we are stepping into Catherine’s world.

“I feel strongly she is saying: ‘Carry on. You are doing something right’. It has been a lifesaver for us. I think without it, we would be very depressed.”

Linda, a sister at Colchester General Hospital’s orthopaedic department, said: “It is a two-way thing. We help them and they help us.”

Help and support of the financial variety has continued to flow unstintingly from the communities touched by Catherine’s life. Roger said: “We have had so much support from Mersea, the hospital and my work, Polestar in Colchester.” Catherine’s legacy lives on in Namibia and elsewhere. Her best friend at univesity, Stephanie, now a GP in Wales, has called her daughter, Catherine. In Colchester, her old school named its recently-opened dance studio in her honour.

At Bristol University, which awarded Catherine a posthumous science degree in 2003, a memorial tree bears a plaque reading: “May her love for the study of medicine grow in the hearts she inspired.”

Back home in Mersea, her parents remember their daughter as an unfailingly loyal friend who championed the underdog.

Linda said: “We have to talk about her all the time. Out fundraising, people say, ‘Why are you collecting?’ or ‘Why are you doing this?’. So we tell them her story. It adds to the thought I have that she is still here.”