June 2018 Report

Dear Friends,

Before we report on our first official year as an initiative of the Corpus Christi Malawi-Twin project, we would like to express our sincere thanks to all the people – churchgoers, students, teachers, facebookers and Twitterers – who have made our efforts this year so successful!

2017 Results

On International Women’s Day in March 2017 we launched our first appeal for donations of girls’ and women’s underwear, bars of soap and money towards the purchase of reusable sanitary pads. We hosted four collection sessions at the Fisher Hall of Corpus Christi Church. Our messages via social media and the Corpus Christi newsletter really struck a chord with many people. After sorting through the donations, we filled 14 boxes with underwear (sorted according to size and type to facilitate distribution in the villages) and soap. Helen of Cheeky Wipes, an East Sussex-based small business run by four mums and selling reusable and environmentally-friendly hygiene products for babies and women, gave us a 35% discount on their packs of reusable sanitary pads. With donations of just over £650 we were able to purchase 250 pads. These were packed into 2 further boxes which gave us a final total of 16 boxes for 2017.

2018 Donations

On 26 January 2018 Brian Wilkins informed us that the Malawi Twin Shipping Container project would be going ahead for another year. Given the enthusiastic response our donations received from their recipients in Malawi, we were invited to build upon our initial efforts and contribute to the 2018 Container. Here is the response we received (via Brian) in March from Maggie Nyoni, a teacher at Golomoti Secondary School and previously at Mkomachi Secondary School, when we asked her for feedback on the supplies we sent last year:

Firstly, as at present, nobody is staying in the hostels but starting from September this year, some girls under the ” go back to school campaign ” will be using the newly constructed hostels. 

1. Most students walk to school every day, while a good number are doing self-boarding (they rent smaller huts near the school because their homes are far). Others girls do walk as far as 12 to 15 km away daily, especially those too poor to afford paying even a meagre amount for rent. Some girls do come from as far as 20km and they miss classes most times.
2. Most of our girls would appreciate very much if assisted with re-usable pads, they are very easy to use and are the best for our village girls who use torn pieces of old clothes as pads. I call them village girls because Golomoti is a remote area and our learners do come from villages. The re-usable pads are most ideal because they will use them for many months or years hence saving the little money they have for other school needs.
3.  As for panties and bras, you may pack them the same way as last year. We have no problem with any arrangement.  
4. If I am lucky today, I will interview & record some girls for you & Jacqueline to see for yourself and perhaps admire how things are for our girls.

Let me thank Jacqueline, Tina & Yourself for all the effort put into this project for our sake.  

May God remember you always.

Kindest regards,

Maggie

Maggie’s words motivated us to expand our project this year to schools in the Sevenoaks/Tonbridge/Tunbridge Wells area and to include an outreach element to our work aimed at raising awareness among secondary school students of the plight of their peers in places like Malawi. After some team brainstorming, Maria came up with the inspired name of our project. With the support of Peter Wells, we wrote a newsletter for our project that documented our 2017 results as well as Maggie’s evidence of the need in these communities.

Collection sessions were once again hosted at the Fisher Hall at the beginning and end of March. Sadly, the inclement weather (snow) meant these yielded very few donations. However, our final session attracted a huge response thanks to posts by Susannah on the Tonbridge Daily Facebook page. We received more donations in that last session than we had had for the previous three!

Four of the seven schools we contacted responded very generously. Our sincere thanks go to the teachers and students of St Margaret Clitherow Catholic Primary School, Sevenoaks School, Bennett Memorial Diocesan School and Tonbridge Girls Grammar School. Besides donating dozens of boxes of underwear and soap, these schools also donated £1,210 towards the purchase of reusable sanitary pads. This represents more than 40% of all the money we raised.

Using donations of £2,765, Jacqueline spent £2,770.56 on 4 April 2018 to purchase 104 packs of 10 reusable sanitary pads each from Cheeky Wipes who renewed our 35% discount. Helen even threw in an additional 100 pads at no extra charge! We are truly grateful to Helen and her team who go such a long way in helping girls in Malawi and other African countries to manage their menstruation and so continue their education.

Sort and Pack

The SALUT-Malawi team met on 6 April 2018 to sort the underwear donations and pack them in boxes ready for shipment to Malawi. The underwear was sorted according to type and size once again. We removed all cardboard and plastic from new items in order to minimise the amount of plastic sent.

Whereas last year’s donations of underwear consisted largely of women’s sizes, this year saw a much greater volume of girls’ sizes, including training bras. This may have been due to our appeal to secondary schools. As a result, we were able to fill 2 boxes exclusively with girls’ panties and 3 boxes with girls’ bras. By comparison, last year we were unable to fill even a single box. After more than 5 hours and several cups of tea, we had packed 20 boxes of bras, panties, soap and reusable baby nappies. More donations came in after the mid-April deadline which produced 3 more boxes.

The Cheeky Wipes delivery of 1,140 reusable sanitary pads arrived on 9 April 2018. These were also sorted according to size. Using resealable freezer bags, we prepared sets of 5 pads of varying sizes, with each bag containing at least one large pad. This resulted in 228 bags which were packed into 6 boxes, each containing around 36 bags.

As of 20 April 2018 we had received £2855 in donations. After spending £10 on freezer bags and bin bags to line the boxes, SALUT-Malawi has £80 in the Malawi Twin account towards the purchase of more reusable pads next year.

Therefore, for 2018 we have altogether contributed to 29 boxes of supplies going to Golomoti Secondary School near Dedza, Mkomachi Secondary School on the outskirts of Lilongwe, Chiringa Parish, St Joseph’s Secondary School in Karonga Parish, Changoima Parish, St Montford Parish, and the Good Shepherd Secondary School in Njuli Parish. This represents almost twice as much underwear and more than four times as many pads as we sent in 2017.

MAY 2018

Following the ladies’ splendid appeal,  they have received many donations of cash and clothing. A report will follow of the outcome.  Below we show photos of the sorting and packing with cartons ready for the Container…