Laois woman (77) holds fast for Concern

MOUNTMELLICK woman Alice Culliton, who has spent 47 of her 77 years volunteering with Concern, will hold a Collection and Fast Day at the town’s SuperValu on Friday 29 November.

Alice worked with Concern from August 1977 until mid-1999 but has continued to raise funds for the charity for the past 15 years.

Alice described how her many years with Concern inspired her to keep going. She said: “During that time, I had different places of work, starting out in Bangladesh for two years working with the very poor who had to live in densely populated shelters.

“After that, I spent a year working with the Cambodian people in their camps in Thailand. They had fled from the cruel regime of Pol Pot. Many widowed women and their children were traumatised from the extermination of their people in Cambodia.” Alice did a year’s nutrition study in 1981/82 and then spent two years working in Leinster as a Concern area representative, supporting fundraising groups and speaking in schools.

This was a time when Ethiopia was in the grip of a huge, devastating famine. Alice requested to work there in 1984 and then went to Tanzania for three years to set up women’s development programmes in the Concern working area of Iringa, Tanzania.

She spent over a year in Sudan in emergency feeding programmes, following the displacement of thousands of people from the conflict areas of South Sudan, made worse by the floods that hit Khartoum.

Alice returned to Bangladesh in 1991, after a year’s study in Swansea University, to oversee Women’s Development programmes for four years. Very poor women were selected for these programmes, which were run in five big towns and staffed by many local staff trained up by Concern.

The programmes included income generation, women’s personal development and functional literacy, with a section for their under five-year-olds in a kindergarten facility with supporting nutrition and health care.

Alice moved from there to Uganda in October 1994, where the focus of work initially was assisting HIV/AIDS affected families and then a programme for the village communities in the districts allocated to Concern’s work.

These communities identified their critical problems, which could be classroom facilities and access to town markets for their agriculture produce. This required the construction of ‘Irish bridges’ across the dry river bed to cope with seasonal flash flooding and, in some areas, water-saving sites or mini-reservoirs near their village. Women in these villages could need to walk many miles for a daily supply of water.

A local contribution was sourced from the villages in labour and locally accessible materials such as sand, stone and bricks. Skilled experts such as engineers, especially with expertise for water harvesting) were mobilised from the district headquarters with support from Concern.

After handing over to a local Concern field officer in Bangladesh and Uganda, Alice returned home to find new work until retirement. She continues to support Concern in local church gate collections and Christmas Fast fundraising events.