if you want to experience something run a marathon"
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Charities...
Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Blantyre, Malawi
I first visited Malawi 16 years ago when I was a naïve young impressionable 16 year old, when (to risk sounding like a cliché) the magic of the African continent ensnared me. This lead to several years working, living, and travelling throughout Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. However, with life's twists and turns I went for almost 10 years without visiting the continent. Finally in May 2006 I returned to Malawi, the country where I first fell for this bewitching continent, to search for a project that will inspire me as I slog up sand dunes, battle with the heat, sandstorms, blisters and whatever else the Sahara has to throw at me during the Marathon Des Sables in 2007.
We are constantly bombarded in the media by horrific images of war torn and impoverished AIDS-stricken African countries. These images sadly have become something that we are almost used to seeing, so much so that they are almost part of our daily lives and rarely shock us anymore into the fever that induced events such as Live Aid in 1985. Visiting Africa is different, it has always been for me a very humbling experience and a somewhat sickening one as you experience the simplicity of the lives of Africans throughout the whole continent and compare it with the vast and unnecessary greed of Western countries. It is not only how greedy we have become and how absorbed with consumerism and celebrity, but it is so sickening to see how resourceful African peoples are and how much we waste every single day of our lives.
My self imposed mission was and is, to find some way of giving something back in return for the amount of joy and wonder, generosity, friendship I have experienced and received from my experiences of travelling and working in Africa. However, I was and am still wary of the damage that can and has been done by aid agencies and so called "do-gooders" and various charitable bodies... so the search was a tough one.
During my trip to Malawi in May, I stayed with the wonderful Roger & Rosie Neeve and through them I met Professor Elizabeth Molyneux, Head of Paediatrics at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QE). She invited me to look around and spend some time at the QE where remarkable work is done with malaria and AIDS. On stepping inside the hospital grounds I knew immediately I had found what I was looking for.
I was overwhelmed with humble admiration. All the doctors and nurses work so tirelessly at their jobs with such simple and basic facilities. All I could think of was how much in the UK we complain about our hospitals, the lack of funding, facilities, equipment and how much time is spent on arguing about pay levels and different rules and regulations. Here in the QE everyone just seemed to be getting on with the job in hand and making the best and most of what little facilities and equipment they had to work with.
The conditions of the hospital were not shocking. It was clean and well kept. But what struck me was how basic everything was, and how old all the equipment and facilities were. So many pieces of equipment had simply broken and not been replaced through lack of funds. Their need is so simple, they need funds to simply buy some of the most basic of equipment: mattresses and blankets that aren't threadbare, medicines, trolleys (theirs are so old they make dodgy supermarket trolleys look like Porsches), incubators that actually incubate, an oven in the kitchen that is not on its last legs to cook food for all the children in paediatrics. The list is endless.
Everyday images of starving African children are forced upon us because these are the images that supposedly pull our heartstrings, but we often forget the adults. For the adults of Africa starve and get sick too, and without them there is no one to look after the children. The adult section of the hospital is vastly under funded for precisely this reason.
By helping me raise money for the Queen Elizabeth Hospital you will be making a difference to children and adults alike.
The sky really is the limit. You can help me raise money to buy new equipment and medicine. But if I reach the sky (or the highest sand dune!) then we can help the hospital begin to rebuild their Accident & Emergency Department so that it really helps those that it is there to serve.
What your money can buy:
5 vials of anti-diuretic for a child with heart failure several 100 tablets of penicillin | |
half a course of treatment for a child with a blood borne infection | |
3 burettes to give IV fluids to children | |
medicines for infection medicines for hypertension | |
an infusion pump a suction machine an oxygen saturation monitor |
And a million other things that are desperately needed.
If you wish to make a donation please contact me on:
(You will have to re-type this email address, this is to avoid getting SPAM email from publishing my email address as text on the web.)
This is not a registered charity and when I complete the fundraising at the end of 2007 I will be delivering the money direct to the hospital. All administration costs and flights will be met by myself.
TOTAL RAISED: £10,000