On Wednesday 26 June four Trinity students, perhaps with a bit of help from Mr King, are completing a virtual cross-Channel swim in the Trinity School pool to fundraise for a new classroom suite at our partner school Chipwepwete Primary in Malawi.

Their story:

"All four of us regularly train before school in the school pool, and it was after a particularly gruelling high-intensity session that we were inspired to pursue this monumental challenge. Suffering in the changing rooms after managing to drag ourselves out the pool, young Oliver ("Stepho") weakly gasped "I feel like I've just swum the English Channel." To which Pierre said, "Wait, we should actually do that." And boom, the idea was born.

We planned to follow in the footsteps of a group of Trinity students from a few years ago, but, much to our disappointment, we discovered that we would need to have booked a Channel swim slot a year in advance to have any real chance of doing it. However, we were determined not to let this bitter news get in the way of our mission to raise money for the Trinity Malawi Project. We put our heads together and landed on the idea of swimming across the Channel in our school pool.

The Channel swim is 34.8km which around 1,400 lengths of the pool, so between us four, and maybe five if Mr King swims a bit, then that's 8.7km or 350 laps each and we've only given ourselves 6 hours to do it! "

The Trinity Malawi Project has been supporting Chipwepwete School in Malawi since 2015. Our core funding is a feeding programme to provide a fortified meal for every child in the school each day; this helps bring them to, and keep them in education. We have also supported some "big" projects, and this "Channel for Chipwepwete" Swim is raising funds to build and equip a new suite of classrooms so that children no longer have to sit on the ground under a tree. The cost of this is around £30-35,000, and every Pound helps!

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