Gen Alumnae helping to fight famine

Recent Genazzano graduate and boarder, Catie Nesbitt, has chosen to defer starting university this year, to spend some time helping others in need. Catie is living and working in the small town of Chifunga, in the African country of Malawi. Chifunga is so remote, Google maps is unable to find it.

Here, she is working as a medical assistant in the small Chifunga Health Clinic, through the worldwide organisation, Latitude Global Volunteering. Along with other volunteers, Catie has made an extraordinary commitment to helping make a change.

“It is a 45-minute walk to get food supplies. There is no electricity or running water. We sleep on the ground, using thin hospital mattresses. We have a pit latrine, a shed for bucket showers where you slop around in bird faeces instead of shiny tiles, and we cook over a small coal fire,” she said.

“It averages 37C, but we have grown used to the constant mix of sweat and dirt that smears our bodies.”

As a medical assistant, Catie is conducting malaria and HIV tests; even delivering babies. She is hoping this placement will help her studies when she returns to Australia in June to do medicine. After which, she is hoping to return to Africa and see if she can do more good as the doctor, rather than just as an assistant.

“Many of the students have to walk for up to four hours on an empty stomach just to get to school,” Catie said.

“As you can imagine, cars are almost non-existent here, and unless a family is wealthy enough to own a bicycle, students walk to receive their education. However, this ‘education’ may come in the form of sitting in a classroom, hours on end, waiting for a teacher to show up.”

Malawi has now been declared to be in a state of severe starvation.

To help, Catie created ‘Fight the Famine’. Through this project, she is hoping to shed light on this issue, raising awareness in the community back here in Melbourne and Moama, where she is from. She hopes to raise money to help the students who are dropping out of school because their families cannot afford the A$14.50 annual school fees to send them, and raise funds to start a breakfast program for the secondary school.

“It will be the first of its kind in Malawi, aiming to provide a sufficient breakfast program before school each morning to the secondary students of Chifunga secondary school.

“To feed the school of 300 students, breakfast every day, for a year, is estimated to cost about A$6000. Just A$20 will feed one student breakfast for the whole year.

“As well as this, we are starting a bursary to fund students to attend school consistently, attempting to eradicate a family’s financial insecurities in order to limit disruptions and knowledge formation in the classroom.

“We have calculated $A1000 will send 69 Malawian students to school for a whole year.”

To help Catie and her cause, you can donate to the Fight the Famine project via the Give a Little website.

Article adapted from Riverine Herald, 15 April 2016