Last year my wife died from Alzheimer's disease. We had together on several occasions visited Malawi and wanted to help build a school for poor children, working with an honest church leader and teacher Pastor Moyo whom we know well. This is in the area of Nchalo, 2 hours from Blantyre towards Mozambique. When my wife died we had not done what we planned, so our family and friends have, in memory of her, funded the building of the school, which presently has 3 classrooms. The school was opened in January this year. Now we need to ensure that the teachers can be paid a very basic salary. This will help the school to be established and enable poor children to have free education. Pastor Moyo has told us stories about how such children's parents cannot afford even the basic costs of sending their children to school, but if one child of the family can be educated then it can bring both the child and the family out of the poverty trap.

If, in addition, we can fund an extra classroom block then there will be rooms so that each age group of children will have their own classroom, so that class size is kept small. Then there is help with the purchase of teaching materials that can also be possible. All this is an achievable goal for those of us who can share in the funding to whatever amount is possible.

Recently devastating floods across the country made many homeless and there were some deaths. For a while the school, that mercifully was spared the flooding, was used to help shelter the homeless. These are poor people who live through hardship of many kinds.