This article is from page 37 of the 2008-04-08 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 37 JPG
THE hurricane and the whirlwind may have blown town, but the mis- sion continues for three Clarecastle girls.
Fiona Donnellan, Emma Clancy and Amy McEnery reaped the re- wards from last week’s exhibition match between snooker legends Alex Higgins and Jimmy White, but the work continues to raise funds for the annual Niall Mellon Building Blitz in South Africa.
Fiona, Emma and Amy travel to South Africa on November 28, to spend eight days working in the township of Khayelitsha in Cape
Town. Before going, the girls each have to raise €5,000.
Established as a ‘dormitory town’ in 1984, during the apartheid era, Khayelitsha is one of the youngest and biggest townships in the Cape. The Blitz will take place in one of the oldest parts of the township.
Housing conditions are very poor and the area is also desperately over- crowded, with up to four families in shacks on one tiny plot.
The Niall Mellon Township Trust will build 800 houses for the com- munity here and 250 of these will be completed by the volunteers during the one-week building blitz.
For one of the group, Emma Clancy,
there is a strong family association with the project. Emma will be fol- lowing in her father Michael’s foot- steps when she goes to South Africa.
She said, “We’re going out on the Niall Mellon building trip. They go to South Africa to do a 10-day stint every year. We’re heading out on No- vember 28 to December 6. So hope- fully it will all go well for us. My Dad, Michael Clancy, has been going for four years. Hopefully we’ll do a bit of building ourselves.”
Last Saturday’s high-profile fund- raiser came about through a meeting between Clare FM journalist Fiona Donnellan and one of the event or- ganizers.
Emma explained, “It was through Kevin. Fiona gave him a bit of air- time on Clare FM and he said if they ever came back to do something like this, he would keep us in mind.”
The Niall Mellon Township Trust was established in 2002 to provide homes to the impoverished com- munities in the townships in South Africa.