Magali in Malawi: 07/22/07

Sunday, 22 July 2007

Breakfast with the "Chancellor"...

Philip invites us to join him and the head of the Chamber of commerce in Malawi for breakfast… He keeps referring to him as Chancellor… After a while, we understand that Chancellor is actually his first name… not his title. He tells us about when he travelled to the US a few years ago… When he arrived at the airport, officials gave him the VIP treatment thinking they were dealing with the head of the government of Malawi!!!

In the afternoon, we go to Chinansungwi. The people of Cedrek Village welcome us.They are very happy to see Philip… He asked not to have the “greetings ceremony” but such things don’t exist in the Malawian culture…
They walk our car to the village singing and dancing… I’m happy to see them happy and they’re happy to see us happy…

Raising Malawi is there to develop a feeding program as well as an early child development centre. Most NGOs in Malawi have the same moto: to get a meal, the child has to go to school… Some children can walk 3hours to reach the centre. Meals are not served on weekends… The kitchen is clean, well organized…

The Cedrek Village has also a water pump… The people can grow vegetables and maize – main ingredient of the Malawian food, and soon they’ll be able to grind grain into flour thanks to the brand new maize mill…

The classroom is spacious, quite colourful… Kids are taught some basic English.
The teachers also run an AIDS club. When I ask what do they say to the children during this class, one of them tells me how important it is to have a playground for the children to be busy and therefore not to be involved in “nasty businesses”…

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June 07. As some of you may know, as part of my job, I was in Malawi 2 months ago. The purpose of the trip was to check the improvements of the Raising Malawi project which is a grassroots initiative offering lasting solutions to the orphans of Malawi. It was a short but a very memorable and enlightening experience. I came back with great memories and the desire to help.

I approached the organisers and have been given the opportunity to go back there and help some of the orphans in a very practical way by joining the Crisis Nurseries Volunteer Program for a period of 2 months. During this time, I intend to use my experience as a Nursery Manager in the UK to try and make a difference.

As a volunteer I will work every day at the Lilongwe Nursery and I hope that I will be actively involved in many aspects of the program:

• Guidance and counselling
• Assisting carers to care for and entertain the babies (play with them and organize learning activities, change and feed them etc.)
• Working alongside other social workers in provision of basic needs
• Promotion of education
• AIDS education.
• Possibly work like simple renovation, painting

Thanks to contributions from friends, friends of friends and Family, I have raised enough money to cover part of my costs but I plan to make a donation to the nursery when I leave.

If you would like to participate to the project and help me through a contribution, please contact me.

The crisis nursery began in the living room of Frank and Nancy Dimmock, a PC(USA) missionary couple in Malawi. The Nursery began as a response to the growing number of babies who have been orphaned and abandoned as a result of the AIDS epidemic. Today it is the only service in the central and northern regions where these vulnerable children are cared for until they can be returned to their families or placed with foster/adoptive parents. The infants are cared for during their crisis period while arrangements are made to place them with relatives or adoptive families.

The crisis nursery took in its 100th baby in September of 2005. Of the first 100 babies admitted to the Crisis Nursery, 28 have been returned to relatives, 40 have been placed with new foster/adoptive families, 20 were still in the nursery and 12 had passed away.

When Nancy began asking people who worked in orphan care about the fate of babies who were orphaned and abandoned, the answer was always “They usually perish. ”While visiting a village in Malawi the Dimmocks were told of an orphaned infant girl. She was emaciated, and very listless. Her mother had passed away seven months before. They learned that she was two and half years old, despite the fact she looked like a 6-month old baby. Through the government social welfare office, they took her in as foster parents and nursed her back to health. Eventually they adopted Alifa. “We learned about caring for a very fragile child, and we got to know the people and the process through adopting Alifa,” Nancy said.

Formal foster care and adoption are still relatively strange ideas in Malawi, and yet, as word of the opportunity to foster a child through the Crisis Nursery has spread, more foster and adoptive parents have stepped forward to take children. The longest a child has stayed at the Crisis Nursery is 14 months.

In July 2004 with the help of volunteers from Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, the Nursery moved out of the Dimmocks’ living room into spacious, new accommodations paid for by congregations and individuals around the country. The generous donations made it possible to build a 3-bedroom house, which can house up to 25 babies at a time. The center now has a staff of fifteen, which includes a social worker/director. Medical Benevolence Foundation seeks to continue to provide program support for the crisis nursery ministry. The funds are utilized to pay for food, housing, medical care, and caretakers for the babies who are being nursed back to health before being sent to a foster/adoptive home.