Elmhurst School visit to Joshua Orphan & Community Care

Elmhurst School Start Date: Jan 27, 2019 - End Date: Apr 21, 2019

My Travel Story

by: Elmhurst School Start Date: Jan 27, 2019 - End Date: Apr 21, 2019
Our relationship with Joshua

Elmhurst School’s relationship with the Joshua Orphan and Community Care Organisation (JOCC) in Malawi dates back to 2005. As part of the celebration of our 150 year anniversary, Madam Hargreaves and Miss Kasza-Martin will be visiting JOCC during the Easter Holidays to volunteer and support the organisation  with a number of their current programmes.

We need your help

We are in need of donations towards accommodation, insurance, visas, vaccinations and transport.
We also need funding to buy basic resources that the JOCC desperately need including pencils, paper, basic Maths and English resources to take with us.

Why Joshua Orphan and Community Care Centre?

JOCC is a grassroots community development organisation working with over 30 villages across rural Blantyre. Their aim is to improve the lives of Malawian children and their communities through sustainable health, education and nutrition programmes.

Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world, consistently ranked in the bottom 10. More than half of the population live on less than $1 a day and rely on subsistence farming. JOCC communities are all suffering from the debilitating effects of significant   poverty, rising HIV/AIDS rates, poor road networks, lack of clean and piped water and very few health and education facilities.

A lack of access to quality education is a huge problem in Malawi. Many children have to walk for up to two hours to reach the closest school. Thousands don’t complete their primary education, let alone secondary, and without an education they struggle to break out of the cycle of poverty. Access to pre-school education is limited and most children start primary school with developmental delay that will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

The education sector faces a number of challenges including: lack of qualified teachers and teacher training; inadequate classrooms; shortage of teaching and learning materials; poor sanitation facilities and high pupil to teacher ratio.

Read more here: www.joshuainmalawi.org.uk

What will we do there?

Whilst in Malawi Madam Hargreaves and Miss Kasza-Martin will work alongside the local people in the feeding centres and assist with teacher training alongside teaching classes of up to 100 children. The work they will be doing will be part of the JOCC’s long term sustainability strategies for the villages.

Benefit to our Boys

At Elmhurst School for Boys we pride ourselves on preparing the boys for the 21st century. Global citizenship is a huge part of this:

- Our aim is to build on the boys’ understanding of the world we live in, by providing them with the opportunity to make connections with the wider global community. They will be able to directly relate their own experience of growing up in London, to that of children their own age who live in extreme poverty.
- We want them to appreciate just how very different people’s circumstances can be: that the situation you are born into is luck of the draw. The difference between being born privileged or born poor.
- We hope to help our boys make sense of the world and their place in it: To recognise that we are so much more than just ourselves and our personal experiences and to see the importance of contributing to the bigger picture.

During the trip Madam Hargreaves and Miss Kasza-Martin will be taking lots of photos and films whilst also interviewing staff and children from the Orphanage. The media content will be used to report back to the boys at Elmhurst on exactly how the money they have raised is spent and how it has helped over the years to build infrastructures such as health and childcare centres and bridges that increase access to remote rural areas.

Thank you for your support, 

Madam Hargreaves and Miss Kasza-Martin