Interview for Remarkable People: February 2014
Millie is a missionary & has travelled to many countries through her work including Serbia / Montenegro, Poland, Africa, Philippines, India etc & starts from the ground up by maybe sponsoring a child or a school. In going to the Philippines she fell in love with the place on her first visit in 2003 when she was invited to speak at a Ladies / Youth Convention & realised that the help these people needed, she couldn’t do on her own. Feeling at home there & feeling the generosity of the people, she knew she wanted to do more. On her return home Millie began asking her local churches here in the UK to write letters of encouragement to the people she met in the villages, she also asked for people to sponsor children too. Some of the children were just on the streets, they weren’t orphans but they were lacking direction – being able to go to school & get an education would give them both hope & the direction they so needed. She has been every year since that first visit, & feels that there is still a lot of work to be done &says that her stay of 3 – 6 weeks is never enough.
Millies Foundation was never the intentional thing to set up, but she says that if she was providing funding to these people, then she should do things right. In the beginning, she knew nothing of how a foundation could be started but began the search for the right people to have around her, & to make the foundation a reality. First, the group had to be set-up as a company & this took shape in 2008 & then registered as a charity in 2010.
The charity now sends clothes, shoes, writing books, pencils, crayons reading materials etc, out to the Philippines & they support two schools out there – one blind school, one elementary school (which, although is Government run has very little in terms of equipment) & there’s also a nursery they support too. In 2012 attendance had risen to around 89%, previous to this, attendance was very poor. Since the growth in attendance, standards of education have risen with the support of the foundation. In another step forward, Millies Foundation & their church approached Rood End School in Oldbury & asked if they could link up with the school in the Philippines & they agreed. This lead to Rood End School’s pupils awareness of what school life was like in the Philippines, & on charity days, donations were forwarded to the foundation to be passed on to the children on the other side of the world – Rood End’s pupils were making a difference ! Unused / unneeded books, old jumpers were sent – anything that can be used again. The Philippine children kept asking Millie what the pupils here had & did at school, thanks to this link up being formed, the two schools can now link up directly. This has been done by letter with our children here in Oldbury telling the Philippino pupils about their school day, what they did with their friends, etc. This has even led to ‘pen friends’ being made. As there are no computers for the Philippino pupils, this is the next step to try & make possible for the Foundation.
Millies Foundation mission statement : Feed the children today, give them hope for tomorrow.
Christmas & Easter are special times for the foundation as they make sure that food & funding is sent out to the people. The food sent at these times, the villagers look forward to as it’s always good quality (Chicken, Rice etc) & a break from their normal very basic diet. At the time of the last natural disaster – Typhoon Haiyan in November of 2013, the area’s the Foundation normally support were fine, so the board changed their focus & made sure that funding & supplies of food & clothing were sent to the parts of the disaster area most in need.
The journey for the Millies Foundation board hasn’t always been an easy one. Because of the difference in culture, Millie’s input here was invaluable – she knew the way the Philippino people thought & this made a big impact on the way the resources are distributed. Her colleague & board member June told me that even something as simple as a balloon will keep a child out there enthralled for hours, it was at this point that I realised just how poor these people really are….
Millies Foundation deal with people in the rural areas, villages up in the mountains, fitting corrugated roofs to the shacks in these villages. The trips Millie makes up to the mountain villages sometimes are done on motorcycle or occasionally horseback – some journeys can be as long as seven hours just to get to a village. A simple pair of ‘flip flops’ is welcomed with a smile, it’s their usual footwear & very gladly received. Suffice to say, plenty of boxes of ‘flip flops’ head to the hills !
It has to be said that encouraging the village people can be difficult, especially the older generations; some of these people are totally uneducated. To make them masters of their own destiny is very hard work. The beauty of listening to both Millie & June, is that when they visited the villages they sat back & learned – trying not to push their way of doing things onto the villagers, but sitting back & adapting to the village way of life & supporting them & also gaining trust. A few days before Millie’s first visit to the Philippines in 2003, the airport that they were supposed to be travelling to was bombed as part of an uprising at that time & so for the entire visit, she was assigned an armed guard by the Pastor who was looking after her. She has had to be careful in certain area’s & says she has felt the unrest when passing through some villages, as there are sections of the country that are still anti American / anti-West. She could feel the tension, but says her faith got her through – never feeling afraid.
All Millies Foundation board members are Christians
Nursing in Cameroon giving polio / whooping cough vaccination.
Came to the UK at the age of 16 & bought up in & around the Midlands, then went to nursing college in 1965 & was a qualified nurse by 1968. Trained in Worcester & then went onto further training in London for Special Care nursing for babies. Millie worked in the London area for 27 years & returned to the Midlands in 1991 working in the local hospitals such as City Road, Birmingham, Sandwell General as well as others. She told me that she loved her time in Accident & Emergency, but after a hip replacement in 2010, this work is no longer possible due to the constant physical daily demands of working in such a department. As you can imagine, the groundwork that Millie needed for her trips abroad visiting the needy people, had already been done – there wasn’t much that shocked her ! The trips visiting different cultures have learned her to adapt to the way of the people very quickly.
June also has been a fundraiser in her own right before joining the board of the Foundation. Three years ago she did a parachute jump in aid of the Kidney Renal Unit & raised around £500. There’s another planned jump in aid of the Millies Foundation that they are both hoping to do.
After the beginning of their support / feeding program, on one of her visits, Millie told me of herself just sitting down & watching the children as they all sat & listened to stories & prayer, followed by a meal. She says that the joy & simplicity of it all overwhelmed her – a gentleman approached her & said “Mama Millie, this what you have started & we will continue”. This part of the program still happens now….
All the supplies are sent in boxes at considerable cost to the foundation, when the boxes are sent out they have to be given to the area’s where they are needed most – Millie tries to be there in the Philippines (when possible!), to oversee the distribution of these supplies so that she is sure that the right people get what they need, with Millie even handing out supplies herself to the villagers. She says, to see their faces when the new supplies are given out makes all the hard work very worthwhile.