A growing Lanarkshire charity is preparing for its “biggest project ever” – as a group of volunteers prepare to to travel to Namibia to take on six different community projects ranging from helping repair a school to introducing walking football.
The group from Diamonds in the Community will be heading to the African nation later this month, where they will spend two weeks travelling across the 2000-kilometre Namib desert with their hosts from the Topnaar tribe and communities to support a range of local priorities.
With all the participants funding their own travel, they are currently busy fundraising to help towards the work being done during the trip, with an online donations page having so far collected £1800 of their £5000 target.
The long-awaited trip will see the Diamonds group raise funds for much-needed improvements to a school and deliver education supplies and letters from Lanarkshire pupils; donate period products and share their knowledge of running Monklands baby bank; and play walking football in the desert as well as handing over dozens of donated sports kits.
Charity development manager Douglas Allsop described the trip as “three years in the making” after their previous international travel attempts were postponed due to the Covid pandemic, and told how the intrepid adventure is the group’s second trip to one of the world’s least-populated places.
It was set up by adventure expedition organiser and friend of the charity David Scott, who is the UK’s honorary consul to Mongolia and who arranged the Airdrie group’s trips to Mongolia in 2015 and 2019 where they built huts, provided medical supplies and played football in the desert.
Douglas told Lanarkshire Live: “We’ve previously been to Mongolia, which is the least-populated country in the world; Namibia is the second-least populated and David has been there lots of times.
“We were originally planning to go in August 2020 but that didn’t take place due to the pandemic; but it means we have additional people going now who weren’t involved with the charity back them and can’t believe they’re .
“There are 20 of us going, of all ages and backgrounds, including grandparents and a mum and daughter – the group is made up of trustees, board members and volunteers from a variety of our projects and we have a huge range of people.”
The biggest project being supported by the trip’s fundraising is at the 262-pupil JP Brand primary school, located in the desert of the Namib Naukluft park 50 kilometres from the coastal city of Walvis Bay.
Staff and community members are fundraising for much-needed upgrades to the “dilapidated” 44-year-old building and to build a roof to finish a much-needed school dormitory, with the aim of enabling more children to stay in education.
Also needed are costly exterior wall repairs, new safety fencing, staff facilities and painting of classrooms and hostel rooms.
School staff say: “The majority of children attending the school are from no-income to low-income households, hence putting their children in the hostel so they can have at least three meals per day.
“Many children are forced to drop out of school at a young age, with only two per cent of Topnaar students lasting til the 12th grade; one of the biggest reasons is the distance many of the children have to walk to school.
“[The hostel] will enable more children to attend, hopefully with fewer dropouts, as the arduous journey which they have to make daily will be cut down to once a week; and the building of the dormitory will be carried out by local villagers and trades, giving a boost to their economy.”
The Diamonds volunteers have also set up links with six Lanarkshire schools, whose pupils are creating books of pictures and stories depicting Scottish life to be given to the JP Brand youngsters – who will in turn make a similar book showing life for Namibian children.
Penpals from Golfhill, New Monkland, St David’s and Kirk o’Shotts primaries plus St Margaret’s and Brannock high schools have been busy preparing personal correspondence to send, with group members hoping to “forge mutually beneficial educational links”, saying: “Developing international connections in a fun and engaging way helps children learn about others’ lives as well as expand their knowledge of the world in which they live.”
Another project will see the volunteers share best practice from their running of Monklands baby bank initiative, visiting Namibian organisations to donate items and set up ongoing links to share information and ideas; as well as distributing hundreds of items sanitary products and underwear to help address period poverty – a major issue which causes one in 10 girls in Africa to miss school.
Diamonds in the Community will also be taking out hundreds of items of sports equipment, as part of their long-standing partnership with Kit Aid, and will hand over football shirts, shorts and socks, boots, tracksuits and training equipment.
As well as being used for sports, Kit Aid founder Derrick Williams saying: “They’re used to engage with so many different community projects [including] health education, sports participation and crime prevention.”
Finally, the group from the Airdrie-based charity will be introducing walking football through a mini-tournament with the Topnaar tribe on a sand pitch in the Namib desert, which will honour the memory of late tribe chief Kootcjie.
Douglas said: “We’re taking lots of Kit Aid donations from teams across Lanarkshire, and it will just be amazing to be playing walking football in the desert.
“We’ve also been in regular contact with the head teacher at JP Brand school and there’s so much excitement building at their end as they just don’t get visitors and it’s going to be such a fantastic thing to be there in person and to take out all the equipment.
“One of our team is a face painter so we’ve all been doing a crash course to learn how to do it for all the pupils!”
He added: “We’re hoping to make it an annual or biennial trip – we wanted to go somewhere that you wouldn’t normally travel to and do some good.”
Diamonds in the Community runs a number of projects from its base at Graham Street in Airdrie, including walk-and-talk groups, a chit-chat cafe, school shoes and football boots swap shop, weekly art classes and its hugely popular Football Memories group.
The group’s fundraising page is at https://www.gofundme.com/f/ditc-trip-to-namibia-helping-rebuild-school-roof
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