St Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School, Belfast

                            Project Zambia

For the last five years the staff and pupils of St Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School, Belfast have been involved in an immersion experience of solidarity, partnership and social justice with the people of Zambia. The school sees Project Zambia not as a charity but as a movement seeking to bring about social justice to some of the poorest and forgotten people on our planet.

In March of this year a group of volunteers from St. Mary's made their annual visit to Zambia.

The purpose of their journey was two-fold:
1. To live and work with each other as members of a community;
2. To improve the living conditions of Lukaska's poor through commitment and a genuine solidarity that strives to understand their situation and embrace their struggle.

" To know (love) God is to do justice." Gustavo Gutierrez

The volunteers travelled to the St. Lawrence Centre in Lusaka. This had once been a wasteland but through the work of Project Zambia it is a place of hope.

Along with local workers the group:
* cleared land that will eventually be used for the construction of a medical centre

                                
* built the foundations for a piggery

* painted the bakery and recently constructed shower blocks.

After the daily work time was spent playing football with local children.

Time was also spent at the Kabwata orphanage which cares for over forty children, many of whom have lost parents to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

All those who participated in this journey to Zambia learnt the importance of living in co-operationand compassion rather than self interest and greed.

Mr Thomas McCaughey, a teacher at St. Mary's, was a member of the volunteer team that worked in Lusaka, Zambia in March 2007. To read about his immersion experience click here