FOURTEEN intrepid fund-raisers will set off on an African adventure this week to gather money for an Abingdon charity.

The team hope to raise £20,000 sponsorship for two Kenyan orphanages by driving for six days through two countries in four Land Rovers.

Setting off on Friday, the police officers, builders and business owners will drive 1,500km through Kenya and Tanzania.

They will leave behind three of the vehicles – one for the police, one for a hospital and one for the orphanages.

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The trip is being made in memory of a five-year-old boy from Kenya known only as Livingstone, who came from a village near one of the orphanages. He died of malaria after his mother was unable to get him to hospital as she had no means of transport.

The trip will raise cash for the Nasio Trust, which funds the orphanages. Director Nancy Hunt, who was inspired to found the charity after her mother adopted a Kenyan child, met the boy just a week before his death last October.

Mrs Hunt, a former office worker at Thames Valley Police, said she was devastated by the news.

She said: “According to his mother, his stomach started swelling in the middle of the night. They woke up a neighbour to carry him to the hospital which is 10 miles away.

“After about five miles, the man carrying Livingstone checked and he had stopped breathing. I was devastated. What if he had got to hospital?”

Back in Abingdon she asked one of the charity’s regular donors, a Nottinghamshire builder, how she could get a 4x4 for the village to take people to hospital.

The next day he called her up and said he had got one donated from a dealership.

Another friend of the charity, an Abingdon undercover police officer, convinced nine of her colleagues to join the trip and got the force to donate two old Land Rovers that were no longer needed.

The fourth vehicle was donated by a Berkshire dealership.

Each of the adventurers is trying to raise £3,500, £1,000 of which will go towards the new medical centre.

The trust runs Noah’s Ark and St Irene’s orphanages for 350 children in Western Kenya, and the team will spend five days helping at Noah’s Ark.

The police will run a training course for officers while the builders start work on a new medical centre, which the £20,000 will pay for. Volunteer driver Jane Rennells said: “I am so excited about the trip and can’t wait to get behind the wheel to deliver these life-saving vehicles.”

Visit thenasiotrust.org


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