First class honours graduate killed by truck on gap-year trip to Malawi

A first-class honours graduate has been killed in a road accident in Africa while on a gap year.

Claire Spruce was hit by a truck in Malawi three days before her 27th birthday.

Her father, David, has spoken of his grief for his "lovely" daughter.

He said he had received an email from her the night before she died.

"She told us about the things she had done and what she had seen, the various safari trips she had been on where she had seen the wildlife at close quarters, the Masai Mara and the remote villages,'' he said.

"She told me not to forget her birthday and that she would be on a house boat on the Zambezi river."

Clinical psychology graduate Miss Spruce, of Cam, Gloucestershire, was hit by the lorry while standing at the roadside at the Zambia border on Nov 7.

The lorry's driver, a 24-year-old with no licence, was arrested.

"This trip was the end of her student life and a spring board into her profession. She said Malawi was one of the most wonderful countries she had been to," her father added.

Miss Spruce had started her year-long trip in September and was travelling through the continent with tour group Absolute Africa, visiting Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar.

The group were waiting in Malawi to cross into Zambia and had parked up near the border.

Miss Spruce and other members of the group crossed the road to buy lemonade when a lorry came hurtling towards them.

The group scattered but Miss Spruce fell and was hit and killed by the vehicle.

The lorry driver tried to escape but was caught by the driver of Miss Spruce's tour group.

He is now in prison in Zambia facing a charge of causing death by dangerous driving.

Miss Spruce's body was due to arrive back in Britain today.

She was awarded a first-class degree in psychology from Aston University before becoming the youngest person to be selected to do a doctorate at Southampton University.

"She took every opportunity to enjoy life, she was an absolute bubble of enthusiasm and happiness,'' said Mr Spruce.

In a message left on the internet tribute website, lastingtribute.co.uk, Mr Spruce wrote: “Claire, we are all going to miss you, forever my sweet.

“I don’t really know how we will cope when you arrive home but we will try to be brave for you. I do hope my sweetheart that you didn’t suffer and that the time you had with us during your life was a happy time.

“You are now in God’s hands, I know you will be looked after.”

Think Tank: new ideas for the 21st century

Third-world aid should be brought to the people, not the people brought to the aid
Colin Murphy

The first thing that you notice when you step into a feeding centre in Africa is the stench. It is the smell of the effort to clutch on to life; fetid, desperate. It is difficult to imagine anyone being able to put up with it for long.

But when you work in such a centre, you learn you can put up with it. You see that battle for survival as something proud that your work supports, not something pathetic that you pity.

After a while in such a place, in some famine-hit part of Africa, say, you come to find the successes more exhilarating than the failures are depressing. Seeing children leave on their feet (or at least happily strapped to their mothers’ backs) makes seeing others leaving for the burial ground more tolerable. Success is measured simply, in statistics: mortality, malnutrition rates, weight gain. Good stats make the work worthwhile.

Feeding centres have been at the core of the institutional response to famine for decades. They have given us iconic images of white aid workers holding swollen-bellied black children in some plot of parched land somewhere.

Based on the hospital model, they make sense to us. They appeal to our instincts for centralised organisation and distribution. They echo embedded ideas of discipline and order. They allow aid workers to oversee aid programmes efficiently.

So it’s easy to forget, especially when you work in one, how unnatural they are. They bring sick people closer together. They require mothers to leave the rest of their families for weeks at a time in order to care for one sick child. They prevent mothers from working on their smallholding. They reduce people who have been fighting for survival to the status of “beneficiaries” of foreign charity, often administered by people who look suspiciously like former colonials, except in T-shirts and sandals.

Around 2001, an alternative emerged. A dreadlocked young doctor named Steve Collins visited feeding centres in central Angola, where I was a T-shirted and sandaled young aid worker, and talked about a curious idea he had: combine the system of emergency feeding with the ethos of community development.

Collins examined our centres, helped improve them and then wrote a report suggesting that what we should really be doing was teaching mothers how to treat their ill children in the community.

It was controversial. Sending things out into a community — whether information or goods — means forsaking control. Some situations — such as conflict — are too unstable to permit it. Getting it wrong would risk children’s lives. But Collins, backed by Concern, slowly developed the strategy.

Last year it was backed by the United Nations. Two weeks ago, at an Irish Aid meeting in Nairobi, Kenya announced it was rolling out the strategy, now known as “community-based management of severe acute malnutrition”, across the country. Malawi has already made it a cornerstone of its public health policy.

The strategy was one of the elements in a recent report by the Hunger Task Force, a group of international experts asked by Irish Aid to recommend how aid money can best fight global hunger.

The report’s key recommendations have the simplicity that comes with ideas that seem, in retrospect, obvious. Focus on small-holder agriculture, it says; improving the access of poor people to the land will increase productivity.

Against a bleak background of rising food prices and increasing hunger, the report notes intriguing successes. Brazil has given cash to small farmers; Malawi has given them fertilisers. In each case, incomes and productivity have risen and hunger levels fallen.

There is an idea that runs through these successes and lies implicit in the task force report. It is that even the poorest people must have a say over how they are helped and freedom in how to use the help they are given. Sometimes it may seem like the business of aid is blighted by task forces and special commissions, high-level panels and international quangos. But methods change, lessons are learned and somebody needs to roll them out.

The idea behind the Hunger Task Force was to position Ireland as a world leader in developing solutions to global hunger. Our experience of colonisation and famine makes us a natural lobbyist for those countries for whom such events are recent history, or current affairs.

And it may help us give those who are struck by crises our empathy, not just our sympathy. That, combined with good ideas and political momentum could be a potent force for change.

Mercy in Malawi

We are commanded to be merciful, as our Father is merciful. Everywhere that I go there are people asking me for money. The little boy leading the blind man standing at the window of your car. The little girl with no legs in the wheelchair. The mentally handicapped woman. The vendor who just wants me to buy his strawberries. The list goes on and on. What does it mean to show mercy?

Mr. Dehnert talked to our women's Bible study about this. All the good ideas are his, all the questions and confusions are mine.

How is our Father merciful? In his mercy, God came to earth for us. He shed his blood that we could be forgiven and spend eternity with him. That is the way that God had mercy on us- mercy that leads to salvation. That is not the only way that God has shown mercy to us. He extends mercy to all mankind daily. Every breath and every step are God's mercy toward us, in a way that is separate from our salvation. God extendes this mercy to all mankind so that they may come to a saving knowledge of Him. (It is not his will that any should perish).

Now, we are obviously not called be merciful in a saving sense. Only God can do that. So we are called to be merciful to everyone in a way that will lead them closer to a saving knowledge of him. Or, in other words, in a way that draws them into community. Leviticus 25:35-36 speaks of supporting people so that they may continue to live among you. As you show mercy it should be in a way that allows them to be part of a community.

Giving to a beggar does not really draw them into the community. I have decided that my mercy needs to be extended to those who are in my sphere of influence- the woman who cleans my classroom, the woman who cleans my house, those whom I have a relationship with. But, doesn't that sound like I am casting judgement about who is "deserving" of my mercy? Doesn't that show that I don't fully understand the mercy that has been extended to me?

This whole issue is spinning around in my mind. There are so many questions. I think it's good though. I think that God is pleased when we wrestle with the hard issues.

Let me know your thoughts.