Homeless to help those less fortunate
Oct 31 2007 by Paul Loraine, The Journal
A GROUP of homeless men from the North-East is heading to Africa to help build a school for poor children.
In a project organised by homelessness charity Tyneside Cyrenians, seven men from the region are to fly to Ghana on November 10.
The men will be helping to replace an old mud building with a weather-proof structure more suitable for teaching, with members of the group using construction skills learned when they helped build the Cyrenians’ Brighter Futures training centre.
One member of the group is 26-year-old Shaun Moules, who is originally from Scotswood, Newcastle.
Having lived all his life on Tyneside, he spent time in care as a child and has run into problems with the law.
But over the past two years he has received support from Tyneside Cyrenians and now has his own accommodation in Newcastle’s west end.
He said: “I have been living with the Cyrenians and they did a selection process to decide who was going.
“I was living on the street for a couple of months in 2005.
“This trip will let me see how other people live. It will be an amazing experience and I can’t wait.
“You see it on the TV, but until you’ve seen it for real, you don’t really understand it. I have only been abroad once in my life before and that was when I was very young, so I’m really looking forward to it.”
Tyneside Cyrenians organised the trip with student travel company Madventurer and Gaps for Grumpies, which takes over-50s on five-week trips to Africa and South America.
The volunteers, who are aged between 25 and 62, will be living and working in Aveme, a small village in the Volta region of Ghana.
Tyneside Cyrenians chief executive Stephen Bell said: “I hope this will be a life changing experience for them.
“We will show them how other people live and it shows them that their situation is not as bad as they thought.
“It will be an overwhelming experience which could inwardly change them. Shaun, for example, is a young lad who just needs something to get him back in the right direction.”
Work began on the school in 1998, but just a year later, heavy storms destroyed it.
At the moment, the building is without a roof, doors, floors and windows, while the walls remain incomplete.
Mr Bell said: “Our aim, through this visit, is not only to provide manpower for a very worthwhile schools project, but to give this group of men the chance to see the differences between homelessness and poverty for themselves.
“We hope this will become a regular thing.”
