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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"), which holds together something like stiff mashed potato. Where do local villagers go to mill the maize they've grown? Home of Hope. During the "hungry season" between planting and harvest, where can a day's labour weeding and watering be repaid with a meal of nsima and vegetables, and some maize to carry home? Home of Hope's farm. Home of Hope is outward looking.
I congratulated Trevelio on his hard work, and his skill pushing a bike almost as heavy as him!
Almost back at the Guest House I met Matrida, very kindly carrying phala for our breakfast. We've tried making it. Matrida's is better! We really appreciate Matrida and her little team providing breakfast and dinner from just across the way. She has a kitchen in the courtyard behind Rev & Mrs Chipeta's house. The courtyard is designed to protect the store-rooms that ring it - with their sacks of maize and beans.
All of us here have visited Home of Hope several time before. Usually we've come as part of a larger team, focused on helping with practical projects best delivered during the long school break. Wet concrete plus 740 children's feet - not going to go well. Wet concrete plus 100 children's feet - better odds. These "100" are roughly the number of children and young people that remain at Home of Hope all through the school breaks, while the majority spend time where they have some family links, in a village able to look after them safely.
This visit is rather different. We're here to sit, walk and talk with the Home of Hope management team, listening, asking questions, making plans. Nevertheless, big team or small, we always want to engage with any of those "100" we can - have some fun, perhaps giving them some bragging rights, too, for when their friends return with their "when we went back to see our relatives" stories. So with an hour or so to spare after breakfast, before meetings, time for some activities - some improvised, some prepared...
Target practice!
Stories, drawing, catch-ball.
Then, time for business. At the centre of "Home of Hope Children's Village" is a large open area with trees. Some play equipment still stands there, though needing a bit of a refresh since one of our teams put it up in 2018 (project for 2025, anyone??). We walked through this familiar scene to the main office.
Full disclosure - OK so this is actually us coming back from the meeting, but I forgot to take a photo as we went there.
Time for the flip-chart paper. We sat around a large double A2 spread and agreed what's important to cover over the next while. A bit of overwhelm at points, as we attempted to squish nearly 30 topics across only 6 full working days. We resumed after lunch to finish, and we ended up with a plan.
Ruth, Gillian, Chisomo, Thompson, Linda, Lucy, and Phil.
We all tried to keep things at a high level today, to produce this overview. Impossible, though, not to follow some threads down deeper. Topics like buildings maintenance, buying and storing maize and beans when the market price is low - so far so straight forward (the ideas at least - not necessarily the cashflow to do it!). But under the heading "Village", Linda Chipeta wanted to tell us about a lady who'd come recently to Home of Hope for help with her baby. She was feeding her child from the corner of a plastic bag. With no money for a proper bottle, let alone "formula" at full strength, she was desperate. Sometimes in this kind of situation there has been nothing to give, and no funds to go and get it. On this occasion there was powered baby milk on hand in Home of Hope's store room, and money to buy some bottles. The 740 children on-site during term term don't make Home of Hope "full". Over the years we've seen and heard so many examples of Home of Hope's openness to the communities around them: bereaved and destitute mothers taken in, given a job, their children educated and now thriving; parents arriving with nothing, and leaving with children and themselves clothed, fed, equipped; fields of hungry migrant workers fed. Home of Hope doesn't have neat edges. This tent is made for stretching, and to keep up with the ever-growing vision challenges us to the core. For all the difficulties, we're proud to support such an open-hearted project.
Alex, Gillian, Jo, Phil & Ruth
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