In 2020 a team of supporters walked from Exeter to Plymouth – now we’re walking back!
If you’re ill, how far would you go to see a Doctor, or get to a Hospital? A 5 minute walk? A ten minute drive? A short bus ride?
How about 45 miles?
St Andrew’s Hospital in Mtunthama serves a community about 90 miles across – so some people live 45 long, rural, arid, countryside miles away from significant healthcare. If you’re sick, that’s a long walk. Especially if you are carrying your young daughter, suffering from malaria. Or pushing your heavily pregnant wife on a bicycle over harsh, dry terrain. Maybe you’ve borrowed your friend’s oxcart to carry your ailing, elderly father to the doors of a hospital, whose treatment you know you can’t afford.
Healthcare isn’t free in Malawi. Ambulances are few and far between. And it’s often a long, dry road to get there. So you put off treatment, you delay the journey, until your condition is worse and it’s nearly too late.
Medic Malawi and St Andrew’s is working in the Kasungu region to improve access to healthcare in the more remote areas. We’d like to do more of this, to treat more people in need, to make that long walk easier.
Poor infrastructure has a similar impact on access to education, preventing children getting to school regularly, or making them choose between attending classes or fetching water.
On Sept 26th we’re doing our own long walk to draw attention to the plight of those communities in Malawi who don’t have readily accessible basic healthcare on their doorstep. We’re walking the 45 miles from St Andrew’s Church in Plymouth, where it all started for us, to Exeter, home of our CEO, Chair of Trustees and a core supporter group.
If you had to walk 45 miles for treatment, you’d go the shortest way you could, wouldn’t you? Near enough as the crow flies. That takes us out of Plymouth and across Dartmoor’s open tors, along its rivers and through outlying villages into the heart of Exeter. We’ll have the benefit of not carrying our sick children, our elderly parents; we’ll have support and tea and probably bacon sandwiches along the way. Malawians looking for healthcare don’t have that safety blanket.
Help us to change that by donating to raise funds in support of healthcare improvement programmes in Malawi.