Ranger Matt Hall goes to Africa for charity.

I don't normally post non-Paxton news on this blog, but I thought this might interest you all.

Double First for Matt and Sarah: making their first visit to Zambia as world’s first WWCP ambassadors

 WORLDWIDE CONNECTION PROJECT

Matt Hall

Matt Hall and Sarah Newton, co-leaders of St Neots Woodcraft Folk, flew out to Africa for the first time on 17 September on a mission to find grassroots organisations interested in establishing informal twinning links with people in Cambridgeshire.  They will be staying in Zambia for two weeks and visiting the poorest parts of Lusaka.  They will be taking some football kit, children’s books and medical supplies to donate to some of the community groups that we’ve already been talking to online. 

Our ambassadors were met at Lusaka airport by Ketty and Amos Lwabila, proprietors of  Kumbayah Ministries community school.  In 2010, our Cambridgeshire WWCP group raised £750 to transport 96,000 servings of soup to the school’s feeding centre.  We also arranged horticultural training so they could start to grow their own vegetables and this year they have had a very good harvest.  Ketty wrote to David Bale, the Buckden resident who created the WorldWide Connection Project: “Thank you very much for your endless efforts in trying to assist the Kumbayah children. We feel so honored to have been connected to new friends”

Our local WWCP planning group has met regularly in St Ives since January 2009, and has maintained an online dialogue with contacts in our partner area.  We hope Cambridgeshire’s pilot partnership with “Lusaka, to the west of the railway line” will inspire other places also to start making contact with their allocated partner areas.  Our vision is of a worldwide network of informal partnerships and collaborations at the grassroots of society.  We hope this will help to create a world that is not only more connected, more aware and more understanding, but through dialogue and collaboration, ultimately more peaceful too.

Text provided by our Voluntary Warden, David Bale.