Scottish Catholic Observer

St Andrew’s Children’s Society in Edinburgh recently hosted a Malawi evening as part of a year of celebration marking its 90th anniversary.

St Andrew’s is a voluntary adoption and foster care agency, which works closely with the Church, and the focus of the Malawi evening, which took place on Wednesday January 18, was to raise awareness of how the society hopes to continue offering support to children in the African country.

Strong ties

Stephen Small, director of St Andrew’s Children’s Society, and Rita Grant, a senior practitioner of the society, visited Malawi for three weeks in October last year and, in partnership with the Children and Families International Foundation (CFIF), provided training to social work students at the Catholic University of Malawi and to volunteers who provide care to orphaned children.

Last month’s Malawi evening provided the opportunity for friends and supporters of St Andrew’s to find out more about the mission in Malawi, while they also had the chance to enjoy some African cuisine, prepared by the Edinburgh-based African Women’s Cooperative, and take in a traditional African musical performance from the Zawadi Alba choir.

“We had representatives from the African community in Scotland present for the Malawi evening and we had some positive feedback from those who attended,” Mr Small said.

Valued help

Reflecting on their time in Malawi, Mr Smith and Ms Grant said that they had received promising feedback from the Catholic University and that the training materials they provided, in particular to the social work course, were ‘greatly valued.’

“Having to run a social work course with very few resources is a challenge and the lecturers and staff clearly needed new and fresh material to aid their teaching,” they said. “Social work training is in its infancy in Malawi and it would be fair to say that most of the students seemed to be studying the subject as an academic course and less as a vocational one. Having said that, we feel we made some inroads into helping some students see the human side of working in social work by taking them on a ‘field trip’ to meet ‘real children’ living in fairly desperate surroundings.”

They added that they had returned from Malawi with ‘a renewed commitment to supporting families who are caring for traumatised children.’

Those who attended the recent Malawi Evening in Edinburgh also had the chance to hear some of the feedback from Malawian care workers, which included praising the work of the St Andrew’s visitors as ‘eye opening’ and expressing the hope that a representative from Malawi would be able to visit Scotland in the future to witness the work of the St Andrew’s Society firsthand.