May/June 2010

• Damage control after a poor harvest

This year’s harvest in Malawi was a patchy one, with a number of the Lifeline Fund’s centres reporting little or no yield of crops. This prompted concerns about a potential maize shortage. However, thanks to the support of Cooleraid Ltd, who raised £36,000 for the charity, the Lifeline Fund was able to buy 250 tonnes of maize to last until next year.

• Scheme for elderly and infirm Malawian citizens launched

The Lifeline Fund’s coordinator, John R. Searle, visited areas of Malawi where a scheme to help the elderly and infirm through winter has been launched. He was able to assist in giving out the second batch of blankets to grateful recipients.

July 2010

• First Lady of Malawi visits Namaritha project

Madame Callista, one of the Fund’s most ardent supporters, visited the primary school, clinic and agricultural facilities at Namarita.

October 2010

• Work starts on building two new secondary schools in Malawi
• Dawn Centre for Disabled Children opens

All in all, it’s been a challenging but fantastic year for the Lifeline Fund. With luck, 2011 can be even more inspiring.

These projects, as with every other of the charity’s innovations, relate to the improvement of farming, food, education, health and general welfare in Malawi. The Lifeline Fund focuses on helping the most vulnerable people in isolated or rural parts of the country.

The following is a brief round-up of the incredible achievements of the Lifeline Fund Malawi in 2010.

February 2010

• New daycare centre for disabled children completed

Located on the outskirts of the organisation’s flagship project, the Namisu Orphan Village, the new daycare centre is specially designed to cater to the needs of disabled children in the area. Thanks to help from local people, forty disabled children benefit from mobility aids (i.e. standing frames, toys and push buggies), a playground with safety swings, access to clean, safe water and toilets and wash houses.

March 2010

• Work starts on the Fund’s 10th orphan daycare centre

The Lifeline Fund’s 10th daycare centre accommodates 100 orphaned children, some of whom will stay in a purpose-built residence. Plans are laid for a full-sized football pitch and a farm to supply the children with maize and vegetables.

See pt.2 for more updates on the Lifeline Fund’s work in 2010.

The Lifeline Fund was set up back in 1999, after Mr Searle visited Malawi and saw first-hand the challenges facing the country. The main issue he identified was something commonly called Malawi’s ‘orphan problem’.

This relates to the thousands of children and babies left alone and vulnerable after their parents or carers have lost their lives to an AIDS, malaria or another epidemic due to poor sanitary conditions and even poorer access to medical facilities. These children’s remaining relatives or family friends are not always able to care for them, mainly because they can’t afford to.

For these children, the Lifeline Fund Malawi set up the Namisu Orphan Village, a safe, happy place designed to provide them with accommodation food, safe water, education and medical care.

Following on from this, a number of new projects sprang up as Mr Searle and his team identified other urgent needs in more rural areas of Malawi. To date, the Lifeline Fund has built boreholes, schools, farms, medical centres and purpose-built facilities for the disabled. However, their work is far from over.

Although the organisation’s main project, the Namisu Orphan Village, helps the largest number of children in Malawi, the Lifeline Fund’s latest project may be the most desperately needed.

The Dawn Centre for disabled children, set up in August 2010, was officially opened by the Malawian government’s minister for the disabled. Since this honoured visit, the Lifeline Fund has some exciting and inspiring news to report from the centre.

According to the organisation’s co-ordinator, John R. Searle, three of the 30 children who are being cared for at the Dawn Centre have now learned to walk. This miraculous achievement has been attributed to a consistent diet of healthy, nutritious food and specially-designed remedial toys, games and physical exercises.

The nearby school – also run by the Lifeline Fund – has a trained special needs teacher supplied by the Malawian government, who is able to care for the children and give them the encouragement they need to fulfil their potential and overcome the everyday challenges they face.

Following the success of the Lifeline Fund’s flagship project – the Namisu Orphan Village – and numerous schools, boreholes, farm projects and mercy run initiatives, the organisers of the charity discovered there was another way to help vulnerable Malawian children.

After finding that there were insufficient facilities for disabled children in Malawi, the Lifeline Fund embarked upon a new project – the Dawn Centre for Disabled Children. Construction on the centre is now complete, and more than 30 disabled children are now being cared for.

The Dawn Centre houses its occupants in a 30-bed residence, fitted with solar-powered hot and cold water, showers, flushing toilets and solar lighting.

Some of the children living at the centre go to a nearby Lifeline Fund primary school, where they are educated, cared for and encouraged by a special needs teacher. The teacher was supplied by the Malawian government, who continues to support a number of the Lifeline Fund’s life-changing projects.

The organisation, founded by John R. Searle more than 10 years ago, principally concerns itself with the welfare of orphaned children in Malawi. There are many of these children, left in a vulnerable position after their parents or guardians die from preventable disease and there is no one left to care for them.

During their efforts to improve life for these orphaned children, however, volunteers at the Lifeline Fund realised that there are many other vulnerable and underprivileged groups in rural, isolated areas of Malawi who are desperately in need of help and support. These included abandoned babies, the elderly and the disabled.

In the charity’s latest project, a new centre specially designed to cater to the needs of disabled children has been set up. Called the Dawn Centre for Disabled Children, the centre was officially opened by the Malawian Minister for the Disabled and has the capacity to house and care for 30 children with a variety of different disabilities.

In order to carry out their valuable and potentially life-saving work, however, these charitable organisations rely on donations from generous fundraisers such as those from the Notre Dame de la Baie Academy in Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA.

Around 550 students from this school took part in a fundraising run last month in order to help around 100 orphaned children in one particular village, Funsani, as part of their annual ‘Make-a-Difference Day’.

The event was organised by Spring Lake Church, who have been working in their ‘adopted’ village of Funsani for more than three years. In that time, volunteers have built and maintained an orphanage, staffed it with trained Malawian carers, and dug numerous wells for the children.

Spring Lake Church is aiming to use the proceeds from the run to continue their good work, providing Funsani orphans with food, clean water and access to education and medical care.

Many of the children in the organisation’s flagship project, the Namisu Orphan Village, have now reached or surpassed secondary school age. However, it was recently revealed that there aren’t nearly enough educational facilities to accommodate all of these children, so a solution was urgently sought.

The Lifeline Fund has now taken the first vital steps to solve this problem, by securing land on two sites near to the Namisu Orphan Village and the Fund’s primary school at Namaritha.

The organisation is now waiting for a memorandum of understanding (an agreement between two parties in the form of a legal document) to come through from the Malawian government in order to proceed. This agreement would mean that the government pledges to partner the Lifeline Fund by providing text books and qualified teachers.

This process is expected to have come through already, on 30th October 2010, so it is likely that work on the new schools will start soon.

The charity’s co-ordinator, John R. Searle, reports that most of the children who were rescued and cared for as young babies have now graduated to secondary school age, whilst others have even gone on to university. Growing up healthy, happy and strong, these primary school graduates are now looking forward to continuing their education.

However, there is a problem – there are not enough accessible secondary schools within the area.

The nearest school to the charity’s base, the Namisu Orphan Village (near Blantyre) where a number of these children live, is over an hour’s walk away. Furthermore, the secondary school near to the primary school the Lifeline Fund set up in Namaritha is nearly full. There are simply not enough educational facilities available to accommodate all of these bright young children.

The Lifeline Fund is taking measures to address this situation, and give these children the access to education that they deserve. Watch this space for further developments…

Brenda Taylor first visited the poverty-stricken country back in 2006, after raising enough money to provide Malawian residents with a bicycle and a new chicken house.

The latest fundraiser is in aid of the Malawian village of Namisu, which Taylor and her colleague Ann Hacon visited recently as part of a trip organised by The Lifeline Fund. This charitable organisation has had a great impact on Namisu after their volunteers and coordinators built an orphan village to care for, feed and educate hundreds of Malawian children orphaned in the wake of the AIDS epidemic.

Appealing to readers of the Yarmouth Mercury, Taylor is calling for generous people to donate enough balls of wool to make clothes for 95 orphaned or vulnerable babies being cared for at the Namisu village. Taylor is due to visit the village again on October 1st, hopefully with the donated wool in tow.

Speaking of her experiences in Malawi, Taylor said:

“The children’s thirst for knowledge is just wonderful. Out there, the children just want to learn and it is a joy to teach them.”