We often say in Hands at Work that we go to communities ‘off the tar road’. It is a saying that expresses not only the physical isolation of many of the communities that we support, but also is an indication of their hiddenness from the wider population, from the structures of local government, and from health and education.
Visiting Mutaba A, as we did in July, makes you realise that this saying is no mere metaphor! The journey takes you over 13.5 miles of potholed dirt roads from Chisamba. Then the community itself is made up of extremely scattered rural homesteads. The practical consequence of this is that our Care Workers have to walk huge distances each day. Asking one Care Worker, for example, where she gets her water, she described a two-hour round trip at the start of her day. Her house was then another 30-minute walk from the Care Point. At the end of one day when we were there, she (then) walked with a friend to the huge weekly market in Chisamba. Although they said there are short cuts you can take on foot, they still must have clocked up a considerable mileage by the time they finally arrived home.
Distance is such a feature of life in Mutaba. There is the gulf between rich and poor that separates the community from the big city of Lusaka, only a couple of hours away. There is the walk that children face to the Care Point. We did a Holy Home Visit to a child who, we were told, lives close to the Care Point, in what turned out to be a 30-minute walk! Over the last year the Community Based Organisation has split into Mutaba A & B, with the creation of a second Care Point, to try and reduce the amount that the children have to walk. Meanwhile Mutaba A cares for 125 of the most vulnerable children, with a wonderful team of 22 volunteer Care Workers headed up by the Coordinator, Christopher, providing them with the Three Essential Services of food, education and health care.
It has been very moving to witness the impact that Hands at Work is having in Mutaba. When we visited there in 2024, it was in the grip of a serious drought and the Service Centre team told us that people had died as a consequence, and how the Care Point had literally kept children and families alive.
When Cecilia, the Service Centre Coordinator, and her husband Peter first began walking in this community there was no school and so, in 2008, they started a small community school so that the children could get a very basic education. Eventually, the government took it over and put in professional teachers. When we were there in July, building work was going on to extend the school with more classrooms and two teachers’ houses. When Hands at Work gets involved in a community, it starts to put it on the map, reducing the distance separating them from the support that comes from access to proper education and health care.
The trip was very special for us as, at the beginning of 2025, our church, St. Michael’s, Boldmere, agreed to partner with Hands at Work. It had taken us nearly seven years of patient, quiet advocacy to get to that point, so this visit laid the foundations for taking a team in 2026. We look forward to introducing representatives from our church to this amazing community.
David & Jane Newsome