I hadn’t forgotten about football. I began collecting football boots, trainers and kits. The Alnwick Salvation Army shop again gave me about twenty pairs of trainers for the Chitipa netball club. On Facebook ‘Alnwick Sales and Wants’ has over 7,000 friends so I put a message up requesting support in terms of boots and kit. Lots of people showed interest, liked and shared the post. Felton Juniors FC was keen to support and found me some boots and kit. A man called Keith Felton from Felton got in touch and the next day I collected fifteen pairs. Sophie the bar maid at the Blue Bell pub in Alnwick had promised me twenty pairs she had been collecting. I got a very apologetic text saying that her dad had given them to a shoe bank. I was nearly up to fifty pairs. Alnwick Town Juniors finally found me some old kit. Pete Hately, their Chairman had promised me all the old kits from 2017. He had boxed them and stored them in their container. It was bad news for me and Chitipa when the news came that the rats had got at them. In the end I got a couple of adult and youth Alnwick black and white stripped kit.

My old friend Gary Stout from Ethiopia and Uganda put me in contact with South Edinburgh FC and I was promised kit and hopefully create a long term link for their kit recycling programme. They posted a message on their Facebook page officially launching their 2018 kit recycling initiative and naming my project as the recipients. The garage was getting full and my thoughts turned to just how much it would cost to air freight.

Since launching their kit recycling initiative back in November 2017, Edinburgh South Community FC had been busy collecting, sorting and packing football kit ready for me to take to Chitipa. Lynne Mantle in charge of the project brought the kit down to Alnwick in mid-March. There were a lot of kits, boots, training kit and even medals. Realising I would need extra funds to air freight the kit to Malawi I changed my GoFundMe campaign to ‘Kit to Chitipa’ and was looking for £1500. I began sharing the new posts. Lynne managed to get me £270 which was great news. I needed to call in all the pledges of support. Lynne had to hire a rental van and the kit arrived. I gave her my Malawi football shirt and a wooded Malawi map to put in their clubhouse. It is great to get a Scottish connection to the project considering the long history of Scotland/Malawi relations going back to Robert Laws and the establishment of the Presbyterian church.

I spent a week sorting out all the donated football kit. I mixed and matched twenty football kits. There were two sets of tracksuit training tops that would be great for Chitipa Utd and the U16 team. I had almost one hundred pairs of football boots. I had too much hardball cricket kit and not enough softball kit. I was still waiting on the promised cricket cage netting. I weighed it all and estimated I would have about 200 kg to air freight.