Hi All
When: Saturday 29th September 2012
Where: Registration will be at Hipsburn first school, Hipsburn, Northumberland
Time: 10h00 - 14h00
We will be walking from Hipsburn first school to Alnmouth estuary (and back)
Alnmouth Estuary
The story behind the sponsored walk:
'In December 2007 Riaan and I decided to return to his native South Africa to work in a rural hospital.
This was the most life-changing experience any of us were to have-water featured heavily: sea, lakes, swimming pools, rivers (and crocodiles and hippos) , showers and water filters.
We lived and worked in the hospital compound of Manguzi , South Africa for a year . This is a beautiful area of the world, with tropical coral reefs smattering the turquoise shallows of the thunderous Indian ocean and magnificent African beasts roaming in indigenous tracts of rare sand-forest parkland. The coast was over 100 miles of National park and protected from development and human intrusion. It was really incredible to live there.
With the remote wilderness and beauty came rural deprivation for it’s inhabitants. They lived peacefully but simply, with few of the creature comforts we take for granted in the UK or even in Johannesburg or Durban , 7 hours down the road !
Louis attended a local church school , John Wesley Kosi Bay School; this is a private school but the fees are set low so that it is inclusive in the community.
The average income was about 3000 Rand a month – approximately £300.
The school fees for JWKB were about 600 Rand a term.
The classes were slightly smaller than the local government schools but still over 30 to a class quite often. The government schools sometimes had 50 in a class.
Louis was welcomed with enthusiasm , camaraderie and a great deal of bemused looks –there were very few Caucasian children at the school and Louis was a bit of an oddity. He started each day singing and spent playtimes practising drumming on old tins or bottles and learning somersaults on the sandy humps that formed the favourite play in the school grounds. The rubbish tip was a great source of playthings and was quite near the sandy humps – the caretaker would burn the rubbish that accumulated in the day in the pit.
Louis’ classroom was an old portacabin that measured about 3 metres by 4 metres. He shared this with 29 other busy 5 year olds. There were four of these end to end and they were hot, noisy and cramped.
The walls got so hot that sticky tape or blue tack melted away and the pictures fell off. The walls were bare, thin and hard and could not have nails or screws put into them. The best place to teach was outside under one of the big trees.
Just like at Hipsburn first school , the pupils at JWKB need more classroom space but they also need better quality classrooms- solid concrete classrooms with sturdy roofs to catch the rainwater.
Water
In addition to providing space, the classroom roofs at JWKB also provide water to fill Jo-Jo tanks.
These are big green tanks that collect rainwater off the roofs of the new concrete classrooms and is where the pupils at JWKB get their daily drinking water from- a luxury for many of them .
Louis would go to school with a blue metallic water container because I never quite believed the water from the Jo Jo tanks was not riddled with mosquito larvae- but the local kids seemed fine and gulped from the Jo Jo taps.
One of the biggest daily challenges that faced everyone living in the area was having enough clean water. Few people had running water and they collected their water from local wells.
Water tends to fall – literally – into the arms of women. Many South African women and children in rural areas still spend one-third of their lives fetching water from streams and wells. They are also responsible for using it to cook meals, wash laundry and bathe children.
In Africa and other parts of the world people walk for water if it’s sunny or rainy , hot or cold.
They walk on average 6 kilometres to collect water.
In the hospital compound we were very lucky to have water pumped to a tank from the Jozini dam, about 70 miles away.
We filtered our drinking water as it was a bit muddy, but we felt privileged compared to most of our neighbours outside the compound.
On occasions, the electricity got cut off and the pump could not function leaving us with no water for up to a week. We were very lucky to live in an old house in the compound which had a bath tub. As soon as we heard there might be a problem we filled it up to the top. Water never seemed so precious! At these times we never flushed the toilet for a pee and were careful about how much water we used to get rid of the other. The toilet flush was one of the biggest water users.
For most of the other people in the area , collecting water was a daily challenge and when Riaan did outreach clinics to the most remote areas or we took a drive down to Durban we would see queues of children and mostly women with large containers by the local wells.
These were tough people who usually had a smile on their faces despite about 25% of the local population having HIV. Many of the children suffered from malnutrition and at the hospital the children were given peanut butter to strengthen them.
We would like to raise some money to build more classrooms for the local Manguzi children attending JWKB school and for the log cabin fund at Hipsburn first school.
Riaan thought that it would be interesting and fun to see how much water we can all carry from Alnmouth beach to Hipsburn school and raise some money at the same time'.
