As many of you may know, a week ago I returned from a two week charity building project to Malawi, Africa. Our trip was self funded & all 13 members of the team fund raised enough money via JustGiving to cover the building costs and local builders for our project.
Many people were kind enough to make a donation via our JustGiving page (http://www.justgiving.com/malawi2010) So far we have raised £4666 and the minimum we needed for our project was £3900 - so thank you to everyone who donated. The additional money raised goes to the Joshua charity, who will divide it between buying additional resources for the feeding centre and sponsorship for children to go to school (which costs around £75 per year). We would also like to thank everyone who donated books, toys, pens, pencils etc These items got handed over to the schools and feeding centre on our last day.
We lived and worked within the small rural village of Khola, about 10km outside of Blantyre in southern Malawi. Khola has had no help from a charity project before, so the community were very happy to see us. Our aim was to build a kitchen block and two long drop toilets to compliment the Orphan feeding centre. In the dry seasons, the ladies cook for the orphans on fires outside however in the rainy season this is impossible, as is keeping the maize dry. The kitchen will enable them to cook all year round and store ingredients away from the elements.
We all learnt new building skills, brick laying, plastering & pointing "African style" and we also spent time redecorating the interior of the feeding centre so that the volunteers that run it now have the Alphabet, Numbers, Colours etc painted on the walls to help teach the kids. All of the children know their alphabet and numbers parrot fashion, but now they can be shown what they actually look like.
Our team worked in partnership with Joshua Orphan and Community Care (http://www.joshuainmalawi.org.uk) who work in 19 villages around Blantyre supporting the feeding centres and clinics. We worked closely with the local community and made some good friends. The children were great - most under the age of 5 and we also spent time with the youth group. Whilst the village was fairly poor, the most needy were the children at the feeding centre for whom the one meal provided could be the only meal they got for the day. All of the community support this and there is a great feeling of everyone looking after each other. Older brothers and sisters (age 5) carrying around siblings on their back (age 2 or 3) and really looking out for each other.
We completed our project on time and celebrated with the locals at a handover ceremony. You can see a selection of my photos from the trip at http://photos.steveseymour.com/Travel/Malawi2010/14226761_GtH6o
More details of the project and what we did can be found on our main website at http://www.malawi2010.com and any further donations are always welcome. If you would like to know more, please get in touch.
Steve Seymour October 25th, 2010 07:48:24