Estelle Arundell : Volunteering in Malawi

Instead of heading off to university at the end of her Year 13 at Craighead in 2015, Estelle decided to take a Gap year volunteering for 6 months as a secondary school teacher in Malawi.

 

It was an isolated rural placement, where she taught Chemistry, Geography, Life skills and PE to classes of about 100 students at a time.

 

For an 18 year old straight out of boarding school, this was a scary experience at first and Estelle encountered many challenges. She had no idea where Malawi was and she was totally unprepared for the isolated existence she was going to.

However, Estelle now considers Malawi to have been the most valuable experience she has had in her life, and one that has given her so many amazing moments and life skills.

 

She became totally immersed in a rural community whose culture was so entirely different to her own. She collected water and washed her clothes at the borehole and walked 4 kilometres to buy local produce at the markets. She learned some of the local Chichewa language, wore ‘chilenges’ (African fabrics) and danced through the night to the rhythm of the goatskin drums.

 

During her placement, Estelle’s village experienced extreme drought, which meant that many of her students had to drop out of school, because they couldn’t afford the $5 per term school fees. Many more would leave school early because they became too hungry to be able to concentrate in class.  As a response, Estelle, together with her two volunteer partners started a project called Fight the Famine, to sponsor students for one year, by offering them porridge at school each day. Through sponsorship, they raised over $10,000 to make sure the project was sustainable. They had to organise the building of a kitchen for the cooking and serving of the porridge and they also had to arrange for the porridge to be delivered to their isolated village on a monthly basis.

 

After months of hard work, this project came to fruition in April 2016 with cups of soya porridge being served to the students at school. Since the inception of this project, only two girls dropped out of school during the term compared to 34 during the previous terms. The three volunteers were also able to sponsor 150 students for a year of schooling. Sadly, the porridge project finished after one year, as there are no more volunteers to keep the project going!

However, Estelle is currently fundraising for another project to provide electricity and running water to her school. The Albury Rotary club in Australia have donated most of the funds for this project so far, and they only need another $1,800 to make the project a reality and to build a solar powered water pump and solar panels for the school at which she volunteered. The Rotary club of Limbe in Malawi has been helping to organise and manage this project.