The Challenge

In April 2005, I started what I now realise was the trip of a lifetime. I headed off with a rather heavy backpack to a rural primary school in Malawi. It was organised through Africa and Asia Venture (www.aventure.co.uk) and I must say I had the time of my life out there. I taught at Likwenu Primary school, where I was taken in straight away and made to feel like a member of both the school and the local community where I lived.

Although the trip was a fantastic experience and very memorable it also left me with some sad memories, the struggle that these people face everyday is unbelievable, in many cases they can't even satisfy their basic material needs and without education this is not going to improve. School for pupils in Malawi is quite different to school for pupils here in the westernised world, it is not just a case of educating children to enable them to reach their potential and therefore gain independence as they leave but also it teaches them extremely important life skills, for example the AIDS education lessons are a key part of school. These lessons are crucial as dealing with such issues is very difficult and because their healthcare is not very well developed this is the only opportunity many pupils have to learn about AIDS which has a high prevalence rate in Malawi.

Likwenu School lies about 15km outside of Zomba in the South of Malawi.

Since being home, I've been in regular contact with the school and now we are setting up this challenge. Likwenu Primary is a government funded school and therefore receives very little in terms of money so necessary maintenance and improvements to the school are pretty much impossible.

The idea of this challenge is to help the school improve its facilities and help keep the maintenance of the school up to date so that it can continue to give education to the many hundreds of pupils that attend there. Included in this challenge we also are aiming to help the students and teachers develop their education.

The Key aims of this challenge are as follows:

1) To re-concrete the classrooms in the school.

2) To paint classrooms.

3) To rebuild the schools toilet block.

4) To bring running water back to the school.

5) To equip the classrooms with desks.

6) To build up the very small library within the school.

7) To bring electricity to the school.

8) To sponser the top three graduating pupils each year to go on to secondary school.

9) To help the teachers receive more training to improve the teaching standards at the school.

Some of these goals are short term and hopefully on a return to Malawi next summer some of this work will be completed others are long term and hopefully with time all these goals will be accomplished.

We are hoping to raise enough money to pay for three children from each class to go on to secondary school, to enable them to support themselves and their families in the future. For the majority of the children at the school, Secondary school education is an unattainable dream, many of whom have now lost parents and are struggling to survive the fees are an impossibility.