25th May, 2007

DAVID ADAMS

It’s the deaths of the babies that get to Robyn Casey the most.

“Especially when they can die within 48 hours,” says the 52-year-old Australian who works as a missionary and humanitarian aid worker in the south-eastern African nation of Malawi, known as the "Warm Heart of Africa". “You can be nursing a happy, little, fat, healthy baby and then it’s either malaria or...(even) diarrhoea which can kill them so quickly.”

THE HOPE OF A FUTURE: Robyn Casey with Esnut. Hundreds of children are fed a bowl of porridge a day by the Mphatso Children's Foundation - for many, it's their only meal. “These little ones were going two and three days without having any food...we’re talking two-year-old kids,” says Robyn Casey.

Casey says it can be hard to get the message across that these are living people; more than mere statistics. She recalls, for example, a conversation she had with a man she was sitting next to on one plane trip during which he suggested that HIV/AIDS was “nature’s way of culling out people”.

“These are actually loved babies,” she says. “Children that have got their own little personalities...”

Casey is the director of the Mphatso Children’s Foundation, a mission based in Kande village, a small community located on the western shores of Lake Malawi. Named for the local word meaning ‘gift’ (it was the name given Casey by the locals she worked alongside), Mphatso was formerly established last year.

The organisation runs six nursery schools for children aged between two and six-year-olds, and a school for five to seven-year-olds, providing more than 900 bowls of porridge every day. They also provide porridge to families with younger children.

For many of the children, it’s their only meal for the day.

“These little ones were going two and three days without having any food...we’re talking two-year-old kids,” says Casey.

At present the schools, which are held in the shade of trees, are spread along a 15 kilometre stretch of the shores of Lake Malawi with one based in the suburbs of Lilongwe. But Casey hopes their influence will continue to spread.

“I’ve got a real passion, a real heart to see it just stretch even further,” she says.

As well as the schools, the organisation also runs a community garden, providing a small additional income for some 80 families - enough to buy a cake of soap or some salt or sugar, luxuries that are otherwise out of the question financially.

Casey says that as well as providing employment, the garden also is a step towards a sustainable food supply.

“One year, when we couldn’t get porridge from anywhere - there was a real shortage - we had enough maize to make our own from the garden so that was fantastic,” she says.

Other projects include work for food programs - in which people can earn a small income by doing small jobs - and a women’s ministry which encourages women to care for each other's needs.

Casey, who says she never in her wildest dreams imagined she would one day be working in Africa, first went to Malawi in mid-2003 with an Australian couple, Barry and Liz Smith, who went to the same church in the  Victorian coastal community of Ocean Grove to look at a training mission they had founded for future church pastors there known as Vision Bible Training and Accommodation Centre (VIBITAC) .

“Something in me was being stirred to go and it had to be God because I wouldn’t have cared if I never left Australia,” she recalls. “I certainly wasn’t doing it for travelling reasons...I had no desire whatsoever.”

Casey, who had previously worked in areas as diverse as real estate and a nursing home laundry, says that at the time the idea of her going to Malawi - even for a month - seemed a “ridiculous thing to be even thinking about”. Not only did she have no idea why she felt called to go but, on the face of it, her financial situation in particular wouldn’t allow her to do so.

“I was still putting kids through school at that stage and am a single mum, so finances were going to be a very big part of it.”

In spite of her situation, however, Casey says she followed God’s stirring and her plans for the trip “all just came together”.

Nonetheless the trepidation she had at first felt seemed to be justified when she arrived in the small central African nation. Her immediate reaction was that she wanted to leave as soon as possible.

“I didn’t like it at all,” Casey recalls. “I found it quite tough really. It was the first time I’d really travelled.” (Prior to that, Casey says that a trip across Bass Strait to Tasmania was the most “radical” travel she had done).

Even at that stage, however, Casey says that despite her initial reaction she already knew that she would be returning; that there was a reason for her being there.

Not that she knew what that was yet. While Casey says she really felt a connection with the women and the younger men in Malawi - a feeling that continued - and was able to “check out the lay of the land and see what was happening and what was needed”, the vision for Mphatso only began to emerge months later.

(It was a familiar feeling - God had lead her to undertake a Bible college course some years earlier and Casey says that, given her financial situation at the time, that too “didn’t make sense”.)

Casey says the feeling that she would return stayed with her on her return home to Australia despite the fact she had spent the first six months after her return asking God not to send her back.

Half a year later, however, and her prayers began to change. Casey began to feel that she was to go back. Yet everything in her life seemed against it and it was then that, recalling a conversation with an American woman in Malawi whose situation had not been dissimilar to her own, she decided to step out.

“I thought 'OK, the only way I can do this is to sell the house, try and be as debt free as I can be, live off the rent and go',” she says.

Confirmation came in the form of a letter from Africa asking her to return and help out at the Bible college.

Casey told her two teenage sons, the only two of her children then living at her home, that she was selling her house in Ocean Grove and it sold within days. She bought a new house in the nearby city of Geelong within days - one of the confirming factors was a magpie in the leadlight window at the front, the symbol of her beloved AFL team, the Collingwood Football Club.

“I didn’t see it as a sign, I saw it as God’s absolute sense of humour and laughed,” Casey recalls. “It wouldn’t have mattered if the back of the house was missing, I was going to buy it.”

And so, with finance now available, in November 2004 she headed back to Malawi - still with little idea of what she would be doing there - but planning to stay for a year.

Casey’s role started to become clearer soon after she arrived.

“When I got there and saw the overwhelming needs of people, (I realised) there was going to be much more to the trip than just teaching.”

The first nursery school quickly followed and grew from 30 to 60 children in only a week. Casey says she was comfortable with such numbers, reasoning that if she came home and worked she could keep an operation of that size continuing with her income.

God had other plans, however, and as her role began to expand, she realised it was no longer going to be a 12 month job but one which initially, would see her there for five years (Casey is now currently in her third).

“The thinking in my mind that I was going for 12 months was quite manageable to me and if I had of thought it was going to be a longer time than that, I probably would have freaked out,” she says. “If I had of known what God was going to do, I either would have said ‘I can’t do this, I’m not going’...or I would have tried to make it happen which would have been just as big a disaster.”

Casey says she’s now there for as long as God needs her to be.

She initially moved into an existing home made from mud with a thatched roof which had been previously used by the Smiths but thanks to a team sent from Australia last year, she now lives in a home made from cement blocks and iron sheets.

PORRIDGE TIME!: A crowd of children gathers to receive their daily meal of porridge.

While there obviously are others also working to help with humanitarian assistance in Malawi, Casey says that much of the aid is focused around the larger towns and cities with only some trickling through to the villages where “there is such desperate need”.

She says it’s important to realise that the causes of poverty are not simple. Nor are the solutions. “You...can’t just isolate one area because that would make it so much easier to fix.”

As with many missionaries, Casey returns home to Australia and her home in Geelong every eight months or so to recharge. Yet she finds it hard to find her place once again in a society that’s so different from the one she lives in for most of the year in Malawi.

“You come home and it’s really hard to fit back in, it’s really difficult...” she says. “There are normal, everyday conversations and you just think ‘It doesn’t really matter. Who cares?’. And you go shopping and it’s such a stressful thing (Casey usually comes home around Christmas) and yet, you know, you live people who when there’s a good catch of fish, they sing and they’re praising God and saying ‘Thankyou God for another day’ and ‘Thankyou for these tomatoes’.”

Casey says the first year when she returned to Australia for a break just before Christmas, she found herself in tears a few times and had to leave shops.

“I just couldn’t cope with it at all,” she says. It has since got easier.

Casey says that it’s hard to convey the changes that are taking place in the community in which she works. But she says it’s that, and the encouragement of her supporters in Australia and elsewhere around the world, which keep her there.

It's not about "saving Malawi". Rather, she says, it’s about “bringing hope to one person”.

“And I believe there’s still so much more to come,” Casey says. “I don’t think for a minute that this is finished and we can just sit back now.”

Casey recalls a prophecy that was spoken over her several years ago.,

“This woman sitting beside me who I hadn’t met - and I like it when it's someone who you don’t know and doesn’t know your background - said ‘You’re about to go on the ride of your life',” recalls Casey. “And she said, ‘I don’t see a horse, but I see you and Jesus on a Harley. To start with you’re hanging on really tight and you’re saying ‘No, no, too fast, I can’t do this’ and then you just relax and you’re really enjoy the ride'. And I think I’m getting to that place where I can relax and enjoy the ride because I’ve seen God come through so many times...”

~ www.mphatso.org