A GROUP of 25 Portmarnock students and 18 parents embarked last week on a charity mission to South Africa where they will help deliver hospice care to AIDS victims.

Niall Fitzgerald, a teacher at Portmarnock Community School, heads up the mission to the town of Mahkoba, near Durban which has an extraordinary population of over 400 orphans, left alone by the AIDS pandemic.

The work in South Africa is on behalf of the Marian Finucane founded charity, ‘Friends in Ireland’ and the travelling group will include two carpenters, two bricklayers, two architects, one of whom is Swords Fingal Chamber president Fran Whelan, an electrician and a doctor and three nurses.

During their two-week trip to Durban, the group will be working together in a centre for children orphaned by, or suffering from AIDS, to help build two classrooms and a kitchen, as well as renovating a crèche.

The medical professionals in the group will also be running special clinics twice a day for the children.

There’s been a huge fundraising drive for the trip over the last six months and the students and parents have managed to raise an incredible €140,000.

Corporate sponsors like the ESB, the EBS in Malahide, ASTI, DAA and Niall Mellon have all been incredibly generous in supporting the trip as has the wider community in Portmarnock, Malahide and Donabate.

National schools in Donabate and Portmarnock were also a huge help as was the DPCC and The Lions Club in Portmarnock.

The foundations and base of the building project already lay in wait for the Irish charity team who hope to complete the building work in the two weeks they have available but contractors are standing by to finish anything that remains undone after the trip.

When the work is complete, the day-to-day running of the new facility will be handed to the Irish missionaries, and after five years, it will be handed over to the South African government to run.

Michael McCabe and Fran Whelan are the architects on the project and they’re not only prepared for this year’s mission but are already planning a new project in Africa, next year.

Students and parents will be pitching in on the building site as well as helping out at the creche and clinic and doing some teaching at the town’s schools.

School principal, Pat O’Riordan will be taking some classes and the people of Mahkoba will be introduced to some Irish traditional music through Portmarnock teacher, Carmel McGlynn.

It promises to be an extraordinary trip that none of the students will forget and one that will change them and the people they get the opportunity to help.

By John Manning

Fingal Independent 21/02/2007

TOP

Return to Stories