Bangula Airstrip

Everything had to be on schedule today, from the moment we left Blantyre to arriving at Bangula Airstrip at 8:00am we was meeting the Malawian Defence force who had donated a helicopter. The helicopter didn’t arrive but fortunately the South African Government had drafted a helicopter to come attend the base.

We had 1000 packs of Ufa flour and 222 packs of Soya that needed to be loaded into the helicopter, the maximum load allowed at any one time was just under 1 ton. We made over 11 trips to 6 different camps. The partnership work between so many organizations was brilliant. Drop of Compassion in partnership with Mai Aisha Trust, supported through AMRA, worked with Unicef who provided the camps, Medicines Sans Frontier who were there helping people who were either dehydrated, suffering from any critical water born illnesses, South African Government who provided the aircraft and Malawi Defence who supported with the loading of the helicopter.

While being in the helicopter you could actually see the scale of the floods and what they had done to the roads and villages. Nsanje was one of the most affected area.

The people in the camps were so over the moon when we landed to drop them food. I remember one of the camp volunteers telling me that we was the only organization that gave grounded Ufa, others gave them whole maize which they had no electricity to mill. Some people hadn’t eaten for three days. It was really sad to see what the effects were.

An article and news report from the Malawi media company was done for the great work the AMRA team and its supporters from abroad including DoC was written.