There’s a welcome with Open Arms for school groups ready to help – Grace O’Donovan

The links that visiting students forge foster a sense of global citizenship and can even change the course of their lives, writes Grace O’Donovan

Looking after a baby girl at the Open Arms Blantyre Infant Home in Malawi

17 per cent of babies born in Malawi today will become orphans, half of that number due to HIV/aids. For these children, staying with their wider family tends to be best. However, the average Malawian family survives on less than £1 a day, and just providing formula milk for a baby costs £20 a month, so for many keeping an orphaned baby alive is simply unaffordable. In 1995, Davona Church and Margaret East founded the first Open Arms infant home to care for 27 newborn babies as a response to the rising number of maternal deaths.

Since 2000, when Rosemarie and Neville Bevis took over, the operation has expanded to two infant homes, five foster homes, ten nursery schools, and an outreach programme that serves over 200 families in southern Malawi to help combat the issues above and more, like the fact that that tens of thousands of Malawian children die before their first birthday due to malnutrition.

Supporting this work in Scotland are the dedicated schools, organisations, community groups and individuals who donate to, fundraise for, and visit the operations in Malawi. Each year, we welcome school groups to Malawi who form a key part of the Open Arms story.

Grace O'Donovan, Member Services Officer at the Scotland Malawi Partnership

Their commitment speaks to the friendship between the two countries and the life-long partnerships inspired by their visits.

The school visiting groups are invaluable resources for the team at Open Arms and we enjoy providing an opportunity to foster senses of global citizenship, partnership, and development education in the students we host. In an increasingly isolationist world, the links they make with Malawi stay with them for life, and offer a unique chance to learn about the political, social, economic and cultural histories. It’s important to us that we support visiting students with these opportunities to experience in-depth cultural exchanges, generating knowledge, helping them think about long-term partnership, justice and structural change, and affording them with an understanding of respect for other ways of being and what it means to truly make a meaningful contribution in our global classroom.

Stewart’s Melville College said: “Boys from Stewart’s Melville College have been visiting Open Arms annually since our first trip to Malawi in 2005 and it has been a privilege to support the children of Annie’s House, one of the Family Homes, since 2013. It has been a real pleasure to see the positive impact that time spent in Malawi has had on our pupils, over 30 of whom, inspired by their visit to Open Arms, have returned during GAP years or university holidays as volunteers. For some, visiting Open Arms has changed the course of their lives: one former pupil who visited Malawi in 2010 now works in Johannesburg for the African Leadership Academy.”

George Watson’s College, which runs Watson’s Malawi Partnership through the school, says it is “proud to support Open Arms and their tireless care for struggling families and abandoned children in Malawi. We have been able to help them extend their nursery facilities and purchase essential equipment such as their new energy-saving solar panels. We particularly appreciate the welcome they show our own students, allowing us to see first-hand the impact of our fundraising for Open Arms.”

We know how important these experiences are to those who visit with us as well as the children and staff in our homes. Many make friendships that last a lifetime, others return to the Warm Heart of Africa, others are inspired by their exchanges to build careers dedicated to ensuring that others benefit from their special understanding of global citizenship.

Lucy McIntosh volunteered with us as part of our links with Mary Erskine School, and spent two months at the infant home in Blantyre. She described her experience in Malawi as “one of the most humbling, eye opening and amazing experiences”.

She said she loved being able to immerse herself in Malawian culture, learning first-hand about the country and its people and the issues they face while she gained invaluable hands-on experience of essential care provided to vulnerable children in a loving, caring home. “It was very special to watch the babies grow stronger,” she said.

Celebrating the success of these programmes over the past 20 years, Open Arms is hosting Cycle Malawi, a six-day charity bike ride across Malawi from 25 September to 4 October 2020 which is open to all. Find out more at www.openarmsmalawi.org/cycle20.

Grace O’Donovan, Member Services Officer at the Scotland Malawi Partnership