They sat quietly waiting, as the silence seemed to settle over the entire gathering. One could imagine hearing a pin drop. A large part of the gathering was composed of widows from nearby villages; most had been selected because they had no food, and little hope of finding any. A few minutes earlier Wilson Tembo and his team had arrived at the One Call Community Development Agency. Everything was quickly put in place and the only thing standing between these elderly women and a bag of food for the next 30-days was to wait their turn, wait for their name to be called.
It was well organized. Word had reached community leaders that food would be coming. They organized a team to determine how many people were in desperate need. Those who had enough to get by were not included on the list for this round of aid. Those who needed food to survive in coming weeks were placed on the list. Each list from each village was submitted, and on the appropiate day the old women walked, some many kilometers away, over mountains and through deep valleys to reach the designated place. Community leaders expressed gratitude that, for the time being their elderly, their young and their needly would be spared the agony of starvation.
Pictured is Merissa Scott, a pre-med student from California, passing out food to the elderly. In May, June and July she traveled with Dick and Suzi Stephens, board members for the Malawi Project and participated in food and medical supply distributions as well as visiting a number of medical facilities as part of her school studies.