New Vehicle, volunteers from Outlook Expeditions etc

              

Sara at the site

       Yes!........we have at last our 'new' vehicle on the road complete with Chesney Trust logo. We can now travel in comfort and style and my driver is being teased by his friends. They are telling him with such an expensive car he needs to wear a suit! The car is actually a 2006 model but having come from Japan it is in excellent condition and looks brand new.......Worried and I love it!  it is an automatic, 4x4 so will be ideal for the roads we travel and will cope during the rainy season.  Fortunately during this fuel crisis it is petrol and not diesel as diesel is in very short supply.


Henry our security supervisor at the site posing behind the car





We paid a visit to the the site last week and our workers there were very excited to see the 'new' car.  We were there for a meeting of the village development committees and for a workshop on Nutrition and Hygiene.  Sara has come from New Zealand for a month to work with the local women and has received a very warm welcome from the women.  We also met some of the women who will be joining the tailoring classes that we hope to get started very soon.




Park Mains High School - July 2011

 On 26th June our first group of volunteers from Outlook Expedtions arrived. it was a group of 28 from Park Mains High School in Renfrewshire. Here they are sitting on the steps of the maize mill during a lunch break

Moulding Bricks



Knee deep in mud with the locals helping out

 The main task was moulding of bricks that will be used to construct a perimeter fence for the school.  We find that most volunteers enjoy this and this group was no exception.  Over the course of the five days they moulded over 3000 bricks and these will be built in to the kiln for firing at the end of the three volunteer visits.   

Traditional meal cooked for them by one of the local girls

Lunch Time:

The group stopped for lunch which was served to them in the shelter of the maize mill house.  The food was cooked for them by one of the local girls and consisted of nsima (the staple food of Malawians) with a bean stew and rape which is a green leafy vegetable

Time for a break





   





Enjoying lunch of Nsima, beans and rape

After Lunch some of the group visited Chisangano Primary School and donated a large number of pens, pencils, rulers, rubbers, pencil sharpeners and notebooks which were gratefully received by the head teacher Mr Nkhata.

 

  

 Presentation of a laptop computer to the Trust.

This was donated by Outlook Expeditions and we were delighted to receive this as our other   laptops in the office all have something wrong with them and we have been unable to have them repaired. Worried is particularly happy as he no longer has to suffer with a faint screen with lines running down it on one machine or the other which was continually crashing for no apparent reason. So a big thank you for this as it will make his work much easier.

We are now looking forward to our next group of volunteers from Kettering Buccleuch Academy who arrive on the 20th July..........watch this space!