In October last year (2007) I had the priveledge to go to the village of Mchinji in Malawi to work with children who had rescued from trafficking. Below is some further information about the area and the project.
(image and facts courtesy of G. Hodge (SAID))
Mchinji is a rural town in Malawi, 100kms from the capital Lilongwe and a short drive from the border with Zambia. Malawi has a beautiful landscape, mainly agricultural, with 85% of the population living on the land.
44% of people don’t have access to clean and safe water. 22% of the population are unable to meet their daily food needs and more than half of the population live on less than 44cents a day. Unicef reported in 2006, that every day in Malawi, over 100 people die of malaria – nearly half of them under the age of 18. In 2005, seventy thousand children died of an AIDS-related illness, half a million children have been orphaned and nearly a million people live with the disease. Average life expectancy for men and women is 40 years.
It is in this stark environment that families are preyed upon by human traffickers. Many of them probably don’t see themselves as that, but that is what they are. They see others, especially children, as a means to an end. They place little value on human life. Many of the children trafficked to this area are trafficked to work as herd boys or on the tobacco farms. They are lured with the promise of pay to their families after one year. A deposit is usually paid to the family to convince them of the promise – the average can be as little as 10 pence. It seems impossible to us to understand how families can be tricked in this way, but often they have never heard of trafficking, their poverty makes them vulnerable and therefore the offers they receive seem like a good opportunity.
Once on the farm, the children are forced to live in horrible conditions with very little food to sustain them, working long hours every day of the week. Children are often rescued from this labour, they may be released when they ask to leave, or they sometimes run away.
The Salvation Army in Mchinji became aware of the problem of trafficking and of the urgent need to help affected children and, with the support of a local businessman, set up a centre to be a safe house for trafficked children.
The project has been open for just over a year and provides counseling and support to help the children deal with the trauma of their circumstances, the eventual aim being that they can be reintegrated back into their own community.
The project has a clean water supply, the children are well fed, have clean clothes and nearly all of the current residents go to school. But the accommodation is very basic and still unfinished.
When we arrived, the rooms had simply been whitewashed, not painted; there was very little furniture, beyond beds for the children; there was no mesh at the windows to prevent mosquitoes getting in; the children did not have mosquito nets; and, the kitchen and pantry only had a sink. The food was kept on the floor and the cooking had to be done outside.
The International Development department has been receiving donations specifically for this project, including the money donated in memory of Major Keith Lloyd, a member of our home corps – Regent Hall in London.
The centre has already been able to put donations to good use. Earlier in the year, local people, helped greatly by the children, dug out an enormous area for a garden. They now grow all their own vegetables and often have enough left over to sell. The children have a lot of responsibility for the care and up-keep of the garden and were very proud to show it to us. I think they were also very grateful for some help with the immense job of watering! As it is important, where possible, to support the local economy, we took money with us, rather than resources, so we could buy equipment locally. The centre manager, Kenrine, her deputy and the Corps Officer from the Mchinji Corps had a list of objectives for us: things that were priorities to be achieved. All these objectives were about making the centre a more homely place for the children to live, and also to improve their ability to care for children’s physical health.
During the week, we painted nearly every room, meshed all the windows, tiled the shower cubicles, dug two paths and made 14 floor cushions. Many purchases were made: including fans for the offices, shower curtains, a sofa and two armchairs, tables and chairs for the dining room, over 100 plants, fruit trees, mosquito nets, new material for curtains and a complete fitted kitchen and equipment!
Many of these things we would take for granted. To them, they will make a huge difference to their quality of life. Although a lot of the cooking will still be done outside on an open fire, the new kitchen means that when it is raining, the cook can prepare food inside, using her new oven. The paths mean that during the rainy season, when the ground effectively turns to mud, staff and children won’t have to walk across mud to get around the centre. The impact on health of the mosquito nets and mesh are obviously huge.
We had a busy week! But eight of us did not achieve all this on our own. Each day we were supported by dozens of volunteers from the congregation of the Mchinji Corps. Men came before and after work, women came, sometimes with babies on their backs, many for the whole day and the children helped when they got home from school. We were incredibly moved by the passion and dedication the people showed for the project. Community spirit is strong in Malawi and the people work to support and care for each other in any way they can. They worked for hours, in, what to us, was incredible heat, with immense stamina! It quite put us to shame. Malawians are warm and welcoming people. Everyone we spoke to was friendly and full of joy! Many of them have a tremendous faith experience and their belief and dependence in a loving God is apparent in everything they say.
Our week in Mchinji was a fantastic experience and we feel very privileged to have been a part of it. But, as we speak, the work there continues. There is still work to be done: a small house has been built for Kenrine, and the cook to live in, but it is far from finished. Also, there are obviously continuing expenses, such as salaries and running costs and the centre relies totally on outside funding.
The people there have had a lasting impact on us and we hope to continue to support them!
