Visit Home of Hope

8/8 pieces of hold luggage through to Lilongwe! Happy. Lucy Chipeta, Rev Chipeta's daughter and Executive Director of Home of Hope, was there to meet us as always. Several other of the staff team met us outside the airport and set off for Mchinji with our stuff in a small truck, while Lucy took us to pick up a local SIM card and a few provisions. Then after a two hour drive, the refreshing sight of Mchinji Mountains. They tell us we're nearly Home from Home. 30 children or more have waited for us in the dark outside the Visitors' Lodge, sitting on chairs they've carried from the Main Hall. We apologise to them for being "late" (Lucy always expands in translating, and explains about the bad traffic and queues for fuel) and say we look forward to being able to actually see them in the daylight tomorrow. Rev and Mrs Chipeta, the founders of Home of Hope, came up to the Visitors Lodge to greet us and to pray brief th...

On the flight from Nairobi to Lilongwe. I'm sitting with Ahmed - an accountant for a Sierra Leone- based charity.  He and his colleagues help remote villages in Malawi build simple safe wells. (A safe well must be capped or have a substantial raised rim, to stop unclean material from polluting the water.)  His team also works with villagers to plant crops by providing the inputs (seed, fertilizer), in return for a proportion of the crop at harvest time. This share they sell in order to be able to invest in the next year's plantin - a simple pattern they then encourage and train the village leaders to do themselves. (Examples of wells built by Ahmed's team. These are in Sierra Leone. He didn't have pictures of the wells in Malawi on his phone.) I asked Ahmed why he works to help another country in Africa when his own country of Sierra Leone is very poor. "I am Muslim. In Islam, when we help others this delights God so much. And I never ask an...

Hi from Nairobi! - well, from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, International Transfers. (Mural at the airport) Ruth, Phil and I have six hours to wait here until KQ754 takes us on down to Lilongwe. Can't wait. (Adventure Hats are a must) I enjoyed seeing the plane icon on my seat-back screen showing us south of the equator. Bedford is 52 degrees North of the equator; Mchinji, Malawi - 13 degrees south. Our journey is a tad more than one sixth of the way around the planet. Impressed with Kenya Airways so far. If all our cases get through intact, we'll consider for 2023