Helping in Malawi
July 2009 saw our first charitable overseas visit to Malawi for a group of current Lower Sixth Formers. Over three weeks, directly after the end of term, Culford pupils gained work experience and insights into a variety of projects from which they then chose the main focus of fundraising for the following year’s visit.
This has become an annual trip, headed up each year by Lower Sixth students. Malawi is a beautiful country and its people are warm and open. It is, however, one of the poorest countries in the world, let alone Africa, and the experience is quite unforgettable for all those concerned.
Malawi 2011
A party of 43 Culford pupils and staff ventured forth in July to continue the excellent charitable work undertaken in Malawi every year since 2009. The sheer size of the group gave us extra hands and for the first time we were able to divide the group into two projects at Nankhufi and Kachere Schools respectively. Having raised a mighty £13,500 for our projects we were proud to put the money to good use through the building of the fourth classroom block at Nankhufi and a teacher's house at Kachere. The Charchar Trust, as ever, had gone before us in their preparations and we were quick to navigate the slippery dirt tracks and get started with the building at both sites under the supervision of the local builders. Our links with these two schools are now as solid as the structures we have helped to build and although the new set of Lower Sixthformers were fresh to the challenge, there was a real sense of renewing friendships established in previous visits.
These two building projects were central to our work but of at least equal significance has been our support of the Good News Orphanage in Sorgin, southernmost Malawi. It is fair to say that the journey down to Sorgin is long, hot and less than comfortable but nonetheless our three vehicles made purposeful daily trips with our willing volunteers over our three day visit from our local base at Lengwe. Any travel fatigue was brushed aside by the warmest and most joyous welcome you can imagine on each and every day. The orphanage has increased its population by 50% since 2010; a sad sign of how HIV/Aids as well as malaria continue to blight the area. Despite this huge challenge it was so rewarding to see how the home has used our raised funds over the past two years to impact the standard of living of its dear children. Funds raised from our recent barn dance had gone directly into the building of a new roof over their hall, it was warming to see that mosqito nets had been well maintained and that the funds raised from grinding maize for the community had facilitated the purchase of goats and chickens.
Over our three days we were able to further enhance the site as each of the groups of six Culford pupils busied themselves with concreting the floor of a new dormitory block, bricklaying entrance posts, setting up a fully resourced medical centre, gardening and spring cleaning the main dormitory areas. We were pleased also to supply 20 new mattresses and medical, nutritional and cleaning resources to the value of £1500. The orphanage has clear needs for the future, despite our work and investment, but it was so heartening to see positive development in an area of Malawi which is so often overlooked by humanitarian efforts.
The lasting impression of this year's Culford group after three weeks of work and tourism in Malawi is that they, like those who came before, have succeeded in making changes in others' lives but also, and equally importantly, in their own perceptions of the world. More than any other group so far the pupils of Malawi 2011 have had to face up to difficult travel conditions, fuel shortages, an increasingly unpopular government creating frustrations in its people and the inevitable realisation that we, the fortunate ones, can return to the UK with all our choices in life intact when so many are resigned to daily struggles of survival in the other half of the world.
Many of our group gave blood for the first time in Malawi - a wonderful donation to save lives - but all gave of themselves using skills from digging to dancing to make a positive impact on our friends in Malawi. After such an experience it will be hard to look at the world in the same way and this, of course, is how it should be.
Contributed by Andy Deane (Head of Modern Foreign Languages and Leader of the Malawi Trip)