Quest Overseas - Gap Year Travel

A huge well done and welcome home for our Malawi Orphans & Community volunteers. The twelve-strong team grafted seriously hard over five weeks to complete a feeding centre in the village of Kumwandika, near Blantyre.

Kumwandika is a new village for both Quest4Change and our project partners Joshua Orphan & Community Care (JOCC) to be working with, so it was with great excitement that the village welcomed the volunteers from the UK. Quest volunteers stayed in the nearby village of Malilo, and helped out in the feeding centres of Manyowe and Pensulo, really giving them a good grasp of the area and the challenges it faces.  In addition to completing the structure of the centre, the team even managed to decorate the building inside and out - and all are agreed that they did a great job on that front

Our 12 Malawi Orphans & Community Project volunteers have this morning touched down into Lilongwe airport, and are off on their way down to Blantyre, ready to head to the project site tomorrow.  All the team arrived tired but excited, to be greeted by their leader Eoin and Malawian assistant Joseph.

Following the weekend spent acclimatising and getting to know the communities, the team will be getting stuck into building a new orphan feeding centre in the rural village of Mwandika, where currently there is none.  These centres, staffed by amazing local Malawian ladies, provide orphans and vulnerable children in the community with at least one hot meal a day, as well as some basic pre-school education. The generous volunteers have also brought out a whole load of toys and games for the children to use once the centre is completed, as currently they have nothing.  The volunteers will be staying in an empty school dormitory (beds and mattresses, what luxury!) in the nearby village of Malilo and walking the twenty minutes to site every day...a good way to get the heart pumping for work!

Follow their progress here!

Rain, rain, rain, rain in Africa, what's going on?! Within the last week we have worked in rain, played football with the youth group, shopped in Blantyre (shniedy Nandos, which wasnn't actually a Nandos), attended a local wedding with live chickens and flying notes.

Apologies for the belated blog - internet access in Africa is limited - I am writing this upon arrival at home.

Alas, our days in Malawi as a Quest Team have come to an end. The final week and a half has been action-packed and exhilarating, and, without further ado, this is what we have experienced...

Check out what the 2009 teams got up to in Malawi!