A Dunkerrin native's legacy

The quaint, rural village of Camross, at the foothills of the Slieve Bloom mountains in Co Laois, is quite the distance from the verdant grasslands and breathtaking national parks of the southeast African country of Malawi, but the two places share a deep and special connection. On Sunday, August 16, a crowd in excess of 250 people converged on Camross for the third edition of the Michael Sutton Charity Memorial Walk, an annual fundraiser in which all proceeds go directly to community-based educational projects in Mzuzu, Malawi’s third-largest city.

The walk itself is held in honour of the late Michael (Mick) Sutton, a Dunkerrin native and a Thurles resident whose family is both well-known and well-regarded in that part of the region. An avid hiker and an equally enthusiastic organiser of charity fundraising walks throughout his lifetime, Michael sadly passed away in 2020. However, his legacy very much lives on. It is being carried forward by his sister, Josephine Phelan, who lives in Camross and is the chief organiser of the walk.

MALAWI

A former secondary school teacher and career guidance counsellor, Josephine has been raising funds and travelling out to Malawi since 2014. Having spent a brief stint in Zambia during her youth, she always had a burning desire to return to Africa and engage in humanitarian and development work. It just so happened that her husband’s cousin, Bishop John Ryan, who is a Holycross native, had spent decades working in Malawi and issued her with an invitation to travel out. It was an offer she couldn’t refuse. That was 2014. She has journeyed out to Malawi almost every year since, teaching in and contributing to the refurbishment of the Lusekelo School of Computing, which provides ICT courses to students for a nominal fee.

BISHOP JOHN RYAN

While Josephine has devoted much of the past twelve years to transforming and enhancing the lives of the people of Mzuzu, Bishop John Ryan has devoted much of his life. He departed these shores as an altruistic young missionary in 1978, and arrived in Malawi, a country haunted by poverty and scarred by a single party dictatorship which took hold after the country gained independence in 1964. Perceptions of Africa are often coloured by conflict and suffering, but Bishop Ryan says there is a whole other side to the continent and its populace. “The people of Africa are very resilient,” he emphasises. “Yes, they have their problems but they are not defined by those problems. They rise above all the difficulties.”

The learned Bishop, who spent years balancing community-based pastoral work with an academic life as a professor of mathematics, describes the people of Malawi as “the nicest, friendliest and most gentle people in the world”, adding that religious fate is hugely important to them and that the Church in Malawi is “bursting with energy”. “That’s one of the reasons I go back there,” he says. “I gain so much from their enthusiasm and energy for church.” Some years ago Bishop Ryan established the Ungweru Organisation, a grassroots NGO which is built on the philosophy of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who advocated that “people have the capacity within themselves to lift themselves”. The name Ungweru translates to “light” and the organisation has a variety of different strands and programmes which provide educational and career-focused pathways for people. The Lusekelo School of Computing is one such example, while another, the Heart to Hand project, specialises in empowering people by building trade skills in areas such as carpentry and sewing.

The Holycross native says that Malawi has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. It became a democracy in 1994, though issues such as entrenched corruption and economic inequality continue to affect society. However, the biggest change he has witnessed is the population. “When I arrived there in 1978 there were five million people. Now there are 23 million people. It’s the fastest growing population in the world,” he says.

COMMUNITY DIMENSION

While the overriding objective of the walk was to honour Michael Sutton and raise funds for Malawi, there was also a significant community dimension to the occasion. Another of those centrally involved in the event, Mary Phelan (Josephine’s daughter), says that there was a “really, really terrific atmosphere” in Camross that Sunday. By sheer coincidence, there was also a vintage rally taking place in the village, as well as something going on in the local pub. Mary says the events all complemented one another, and seemed to almost merge into one big cross-community festival. Despite being a relatively small village, Mary says that Camross has “always been exciting in terms of the community aspect”. She describes the people there as hugely “community-driven” and also as “hurling fanatics”. However, the village has undergone somewhat of a transformation over the past few years. “In terms of the actual facilities in the village, it’s amazing what has happened in the last five years since Covid,” Mary says. “Lots of people are moving back to the area. We have a community park with a running track around it, a café and a gym. And there seems to be clubs being set up everywhere.” Added to that, Camross now has a unique bond with a country in a distant land. The late Michael Sutton would be very proud.