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:
Sadly the number of children orphaned due to a combination of poverty and disease, particularly HIV/AIDS, numbers over half a million in Malawi. The work Quest does with JOCC is to enable communities to support these vulnerable children in their midst, no easy feat when the community as a whole is struggling to provide for itself through subsistence farming, and with commodity prices constantly rising. We support these communities by providing feeding centres, many of them financed and built by volunteers for the community to use, where millet porridge is
provided along with basic pre-school education and care.
The job done by the team has been absolutely fantastic and we’ve been told that more than a few tears were shed by the team when they left the village at the end of their work, so Malawi has definitely made its mark on the volunteers, as well as vice versa.
Chloe, Rachel, Sam, Jen, Lara, Rachael, Ben, Laura, Jessica, Anna, Ellen and Natalie – WELL DONE.