MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN MALAWI
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what we do

Statement by Betty.

I was first taken to Malawi in January 2007, to see a village district called Kaponda and a school called Dambo. I arrived at my hotel only to find that my luggage had not!  61 years of age, in a country I knew nothing about and wearing the clothes I had travelled in for the past 26 hours. I was taken by road for two hours through rough terrain to Kaponda and really wasnÕt prepared for the sight that met my eyes: it was like I had arrived on a different planet.  Suddenly I realised that my concerns over a long flight and missing luggage were meaningless in their triviality. The village in which we stopped had no clean water and no electricity, no houses, only mud huts, and a horrific stench brought about by a complete lack of sanitation.

However, it was the children that made the greatest impression upon me, and touched my heart the most that day: hundreds of beautiful children with swollen tummies, all of them starving, no food to eat, no access to medical or educational facilities. I’m not ashamed to say that I broke down in tears, unable to understand how any human being could, or should be forced to, live that way. That encounter changed my life forever, and I have pledged that to my dying day I will not stop trying to help those children.

What we have achieved so far
So far in Kaponda we have achieved a great deal. We have built a health clinic that is staffed by a full-time nurse. We have dug a well to provide villagers with fresh drinking water. We have constructed two pre-schools and staffed them with two full-time teachers, educating (and feeding) 400 kids from two to seven years of age, many of whom are orphans. We have also constructed a workshop and provided three sewing machines, enabling villagers to make clothes for the children.

It doesn’t stop there. Our efforts to date have also provided 50 chickens (supplying 40 eggs per day), eight goats for milking, 30 rabbits, and a vegetable area where villagers grow their own tomatoes, cabbages and lettuce.  We have also employed two full-time cooks to help feed the children, along with a village manager to keep things running smoothly. We have also supplied ten bicycles, which make up the villagers only available mode of transport (other than walking).

What are our future aims?
In the Kaponda district there are more than 1,290 children over the age of seven who have nothing whatsoever — no education, no food, etc. Our aim is clear: to help those remaining children. With your assistance, we hope to raise sufficient funds to enable the construction of five new buildings in Kaponda.  These will house ten classrooms in which to educate and feed all of the remaining children.  Go to our How You Can Help page for more info.