County Derry duo to travel to South Africa for building blitz

County Derry girls Aoife McOscar, from Castledawson, and Lisa Lavery, from Magherafelt, are planning to travel to South Africa with the Mellon Educate team on their 2024 building blitz in November.

The aim of this blitz is to build more schools and essential facilities for deprived township children and communities.
Since 2013, Mellon Educate has set about improving access to better standards of education in African townships. To date, the charity has built and renovated over 32 schools, providing over 50,000 young children with a better chance at life. The charity is building educational programmes throughout Africa that will benefit over 100,000 primary school kids.

There are 150 new volunteers this year and the girls hope to help build two schools. The two schools are Silukhanyo PS and Umnqophiso PS and they are located in a township called Lwandle (Zulu for ocean) near Somerset West, about 45 minutes drive from where the girls are staying. Between the schools almost 2,800 learners will benefit from the work they will carry out this year.

Aoife said: “This is the first time that myself and Lisa will be joining the volunteers on the building blitz but have been raising funds for this amazing charity for a number of years as my father Cathal is a veteran volunteer. He has seen first hand the level of poverty in these townships and the positive change that we can make. When he went last year we saw all the photos and videos and we decided that we wanted to go.

“It will be extremely rewarding to travel to South Africa with Mellon Educate and see first hand where all donations end up and the immense impact it makes on people’s lives - especially the children. We want to see what other people live like. It will be really good to help the less fortunate.”

Lisa added: “It is an opportunity to see people with less, it makes you appreciate more of what you have. It’s on a completely different scale to anything we have seen in Ireland.”

Aoife and Lisa would like to give thanks to all that have donated to the fundraising effort so far.

The girls have a JustGiving Page if you would like to donate you can do via justgiving.com/page/aoife-lisa-buildingblitz2024