Dear Friends and Colleagues

 

As I have informed a number of you, I have agreed to join a charity team to climb Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in the first week of October this year.  Standing at almost 20,000 feet, Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain in Africa and represents a very real challenge for team.  While this is an adventure for the team, the most important objective of the trip is to use this opportunity to raise funds for War Child, a charity we all have in the past and continue to support.

War Child (www.warchild.org.uk) is a small children’s charity committed to helping and protecting children living in the world’s most dangerous war zones. At this time the charity is active in Iraq, Afghanistan and D.R. Congo providing support and financial assistance to local organisations.  The continuing conflicts in these regions have killed and displaced many but it is perhaps the children of these regions that have and continue to suffer the most as they are not able to protect or speak for themselves.  As the problems these children face are not universal, the solutions War Child looks to provide are tailored to the individual requirements of the most vulnerable children.  In the Congo upwards of 30,000 children have been actively engaged as child soldiers in the decade long civil war.  Of those who survive and are no longer part of fighting forces, at least 10,000 have been unable to reconnect with their families and communities and are forced to live and work on the streets with many more being accused of witchcraft and excluded from society.  War Child currently supports residential children centres in Kinshasha, provides health care and education in more remote communities and grants seed loans for returning child soldiers to enable them to set up business for themselves.   In Afghanistan, conflict has destroyed the economy and resulted in many women and children are being forced into crime to survive.  Afghan penal authorities are overloaded and so many children have ended up in adult prisons either to serve sentence or as a result of their mother’s being rape once inside. Once in prison the children are often exposed to abuse from inmates and guards. War Child's pioneering work has enabled the separation of children from adults in prison by setting up Juvenile Rehabilitation Centres and even kindergarten services to ensure they have access to adequate healthcare, food, clothing and recreation.

As always, more can be done if the funds can be found and I would therefore ask you to donate generously to what I believe is a worthy and unfortunately necessary cause.   Thank you in advance for your support and I will keep you informed as to our progress.

Simon