Malawi Orphan Fund

[Previous post ]  Trevelio lives in a village nearby. We bumped into each as I went for a short early walk towards the Home of Hope main gate, just as he was coming in. "What's this on your bike? How far have you come?" I asked.  "This is 50kg of maize, and it should be almost 3km." One of several ways to be woken in the morning at Home of Hope is the sudden rising tone of the electric maize mill spinning up. Aesthetically I prefer the cockerels option, but the song of the mill tells a story at the heart of Home of Hope. Sure there are walls around it (some topped with broken glass, which make raiding baboons think twice), but a closed community it is not.  Malawi runs on maize: for breakfast, soft porridge of boiled ground maize flour ("mgaiwa phala" - literally, "flour porridge"), to which we out-of-towners tend to add a bit of butter, and something sweet; other meals are built around the thicker "nsima" (literally "mush...

[ Previous post ]  Addis Ababa's international airport is generically contemporary - a "this could be Rotterdam or anywhere" experience compared to, say, Johannesburg's African art and wildlife references. Efficient. Everything worked. And why not? Africa is developed and developing. Ancient and modern.  Ethiopian will fly you direct to Beijing, Brussels; Chicago, Copenhagen... a real continental hub.  Queuing to board the flight to Lilongwe, Phil and I got talking to the man in front of us. "Oh yes, I know Reverend Chipeta very well! I've been to Home of Hope many times." Harrington Banda worked with World Vision in the noughties, helping to fund the Home's early building projects. He now works for a water aid charity in Rwanda. "Please greet Rev. Chipeta for me. My father in law was a minister with him. They called each other brothers."  Things like this often happened as we travel. Home of Hope is famous amongst Malawians, and at 96, Rev...

[ Previous post ]  It was during my first visit to Home of Hope in 2011, with a church youth group and other leaders, that we first heard Rev Chipeta’s four-word vision: “From infancy to independence”. At that time, the first “intake” of children had grown up into older teenagers. Without the grades for university, and without the funds for Technical College, children who had survived the loss of parents, perhaps to HIV AIDS - a scourge in Malawi for decades - a generation of children who had at least lived,  then languished as they returned as young adults with no prospects to remote villages. “It’s almost worse for them that they came to Home of Hope. When they go back to the village, they suffer.” With this realisation, Home of Hope’s unwritten aim shifted from Survive to Thrive. “We must bring these children to independence!” Isn’t this the dream of a parent? How could Home of Home realise that dream for hundreds of parentless ones? In 2011, the Primary and Secondary Schoo...

What do you see? How does one open one's ears? Is it possible to perceive with the heart? A few of us from Malawi Orphan Fund are travelling this week to spend time at the amazing village-come-school "Home of Hope". Many reading this will already know a lot about it, perhaps because you sponsor a child there, or support in some other way. Whether that's you, or you're new, welcome!  Back to my questions. If you've travelled, you'll know the saying is true: you can leave everything else behind, but not yourself. And that's a problem. It's possible to arrive and unpack, along with the mosquito spray and toothbrush, an alien set of expectations that just don't fit the destination. They can render us blind, deaf and unempathetic to local realities. This week at an event in London I found myself "randomly" seated next to a gentleman whose family traces back to Malawi. Like me he's lived and worked for most of his life in the UK. ...