WOW - I'm back from Zambia and what an amazing experience - It was different from what I was expecting in many ways - It really made me appreciate the things we normally take for granted - clean water, enough food, good health of most of the people we know.   I guess the children looked healthier than I thought and it was easy to forget that they are all living with HIV and AIDS but that is because they have a place at the daycare centre and are getting the right medication but for every child their there are probably another 5 in need of a place. 

We had quite a fraught few days at first because the container with the playground in had been delayed by about 10 weeks and still hadn't arrived - we had to buy tools and paint locally to make a start on the preparation for the playground and we started painting murals all over the inside of the daycare centre. Finally the container turned up and the playground was put together in record time.  We went out there in the hope of making a different and the children and staff really appreciated the playground, murals, clothes and toys but I realise now we are just a tiny drop in a very big ocean!

Perhaps the most poignant moment for me was that we met two lovely 17 year old twin girls who were visiting their father at the main hospice when we arrived.  They were bright, well spoken and amazingly positive considering that their father and mother were both ill.  At the end of the project they had taken a day of school to walk for an hour to wait for us outside the hospice - they were not allowed in as their father had died a few days earlier.  Their mother had sent them to thank us because their dad had died in 'the butterfly room' - a dismal dirty room which we had transformed with a lick of paint and lovely painted butterflies which one of the local men had helped design.  It was a much more pleasant place for him to spend his last few hours than before we arrived.  It's nice to know that the tiny drop in the ocean isn't lost.

The other great news is that after dressing as the Demelza clown for the mini Great North Run with Naomi we collected enought money to be within a few pence of the 6000 pound target!!!

Thank you so much for all of your help with fundraising,

Jill