UNICEF Ambassador Ewan McGregor and children at Consol Homes Orphan Care.
UNICEF/ 2005/Caroline Irby

Ewan McGregor’s Malawi Field Trip Diary.

Diary entry two:

“We drove to Consol Homes Orphan Care, which is a big centre that UNICEF has helped to support. Its an incredible place, it really is: different projects within the one centre. There’s a day care centre for little children who’ve been orphaned by AIDS where their grandmother - or whoever is looking after them - can take them. There are some toys – not many, but enough to keep them occupied, and the carers play games with them.

It’s really simple what UNICEF do in these community based child care centres. The community is in charge of finding and preparing a space for the orphans to be looked after on a day-care type basis. UNICEF send over supplies: paper, paints and printing things, some educational books for the children, building blocks, a few toys – just very basic things that kids need to behave like kids. The head of the village is responsible for allocating a piece of land to be the garden, and there they grow maize or soy beans, and vegetables with which the carers cook so the kids get at least one proper meal a day.

We met some of the grandmothers and the widows; they’re being taught skills that they can take back to their villages that not only help feed the children they are looking after, but also maybe make them some money. A group of grandmothers were being shown how to pound nuts into a mush and then extract the oil, which they can cook with or sell at the market. Others were being taught how to make soap to sell.

The Memory Book by Martha Mbewe, a sixteen-year-old orphaned by AIDS.
UNICEF/ 2005/Caroline Irby

The Memory Book

We met this fantastic girl, who was 16 and had lost both her parents to Aids. She showed us a memory book, where the children can put down their thoughts and feelings about the parents they’ve lost and about how they feel and see themselves now. This girl’s book was full of incredible pictures of flowers and the word love, and a picture of herself playing with a football. She told us she considered herself to be a hero because after her parents died people were encouraging her to marry and have a child. She was 16 and said no, she wanted to stay at school, because one day she wanted to be a driver.

Wonderful, really wonderful.”