The story of how a charity cake sale at Bud Garden Centre helped to put taps into a village in the Gambia, by Liz Thomas. Manduar is a small rural village way, way ‘up country’ in the long thin country of Gambia. Our first trip involved a long journey on a pot holed, dusty road. I first visited Manduar as part of a group of public health students in 2007. We went there to learn from the very successful breastfeeding project running in the village. Rural life in Gambia is hard work as people live on what they grow. However we were humbled by the warmth of our welcome and the time the villagers kindly spent with us. We all found the visit very moving and inspiring. We agreed as a group that we would like to give something back to the village to thank them for their time and generosity to us. We clubbed together and in 2009 we had enough money for the villagers to build a centre where children could be looked after communally whilst their mothers worked in the fields. A further visit by some of our group to the village led to a really fascinating discussion with the village health committee about the lives of women in the village. Women in Gambia work hard. Improved access to clean water was a key issue for the village women. We began to fundraise for a solar powered water pump for the village. Manduar Matters was born! The first charity cake stall held at Bud was in 2012 and raised £800! Everything we sold on the cake stall was donated, so every penny spent on the day went straight to Manduar Matters. As a group we had raised £8,000 by 2013, and the solar pump supplying 2 taps was installed. I was part of a group who visited the village again in April 2013 and saw the pump in action. I heard the villagers speaking about the difference it had made to their lives. Something that really touched me was seeing the school vegetable garden. Children at the primary school now have more energy for learning because they are not carrying water before school. A tap in the school compound enables each class to tend their own vegetable patch. The vegetables are used in school meals cooked by the mothers in the children’s centre, which has resulted in improved nutrition and a fall in vitamin A deficiency, which in Gambia is a serious health problem. I thought about the grumbles on my allotment site over a tap shared by about 20 allotmenteers. In Manduar 2,000 people share 2 taps for all their daily needs. We agreed to keep fundraising. The charity cake stall at Bud that year raised £1,080: enough to expand the network of taps. This year we raised a further £741. This all goes to Manduar Matters. The village are currently debating whether to save for a more extensive network of taps or to spend what has been raised so far on a smaller project. So a big, big thank you from myself and the villagers of Manduar to everybody who made or bought a cake, donated a raffle prize or bought a raffle ticket. Thank you also to Brenda and Severine who have helped in so many ways to make the cake sale such a success and to everybody who helped out on the day. manduarmatters.org
Posted on: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 06:17:19 +0000
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