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Interact visit to Open Arms Infant Home

Daisy McCaulder

On Monday 20^th September 2010 our newly formed Interact group went on our first visit to a local children’s home. Our aim is to help the local community, and improve their living environment in any way we can.

Objective of visit:

One of the projects we are eager to get involved with is helping children in Malawi. Open arms is a reputable childcare provider and we thought it would be a worthwhile visit. The objective of our visit was to try and understand how Open Arms works and how they have succeeded in building a successful infant home and sustaining the funding needed to run it. Our thinking was, we could then look to help develop younger and smaller children’s homes and possibly transfer Open Arms successful operating methods.

The Visit

At Open Arms we were met by Mrs Phiri and Mr Bevis who gave us a tour of the site and explained Open Arms background and some of their current projects. We learnt that Open Arms should never be referred to as an orphanage, as it is not. It is in fact a temporary infant home. Most of the children housed at Open Arms have relatives who visit them and will, in time, hopefully take them back to their homes. However, if and when the children are returned to their village or community, Open Arms will continue to visit them regularly to make sure the child is being cared for appropriately.

Where children don’t have known relatives, applications for adoption can be made. Open Arms also has several houses in and around Blantyre where children that cannot be returned to their homes and their relatives refuse to give permission for them to be adopted, live together (up to around 10 children per house) with foster parents. Open Arms has grown from a house with 9 babies to a well known and successful infant home with branches in different areas of Blantyre and Mangochi.

What has been achieved?

Our general opinion is it was a worthwhile visit, and we were given some valuable information. However, as a group we will disscuss exactly how we are to proceed from here in further meetings.