By Anthony Barich
National reporter
University of Notre Dame Australia students confronted environmental, health and economic concerns for people in a Malawi village during a 23 November-6 December immersion trip, said participant Lana Robinson.
Miss Robinson, an Arts and Commerce student at UNDA’s Fremantle campus, undertook the immersion trip with five other students, UNDA Politics and International Relations lecturer Dr Martin Drum and Caritas’ Global Education Advisor Janine Murphy.
Addressing the 25 February Project Compassion launch at Parliament House, Miss Robinson said that by introducing clay pots as an alternative for cooking over smoky wood fires, the students demonstrated how “one simple initiative can yield significant impacts upon numerous facets of daily life”.
By reducing dependency on firewood for cooking, the introduction of the clay pots helped address concerns of deforestation and degradation while reducing the intake of harmful fumes, which in turn would help improve the health of many women and children.
The villagers were also taught how to construct these stoves to sell them which would generate a significant source of income, Miss Robinson said.
“Such development is a microcosm of Caritas’ aim of providing sustainable, integrated and holistic development initiatives and, as such, concurs with the eight millennium development goals,” she told the launch.
“Most significantly, the approach which Caritas adopts adheres to principles of subsidiarity, solidarity and human dignity. In simple terms, this means that the people Caritas helps run the programmes themselves and take responsibility for their success.
“As a result, the work of Caritas engenders a sense of empowerment and integrity which encourages participation, self-sufficiency and self-reliance, and which ultimately satisfies their philosophy of ‘helping people help themselves’.”
She said local villagers praised the work of the Catholic Development Commission in Malawi (CADECOM) with graffiti on a sanitary block marked with the words: “We love CADECOM” – an indication of the invaluable difference its partnership with Caritas yielded.
CADECOM carried out Caritas’ development projects by helping them address specific needs identified by the communities.
Miss Robinson also noted that, although significant progress has been made on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which are to be met by 2015, there are still a billion people living on less than one US dollar a day and over 820 million are going to bed hungry each night.
“Therefore, I encourage the international community to act now in order to ensure that the goals are met by 2015.
“Both individually and collectively, we need to maintain a commitment to achieving the Millennium Development Goals which are a global blueprint for breaking the chains of poverty,” she said.