St. Paul's Church, Scotland
St. Paul's Church is based in Glasgow in the eastern part of the city. It is in a residential area called BlackhilllProvanmill. The church has a small membership attendance of about 30 people during Sunday service worship. Provanmill has serious issues such as unemployment, drug/alcohol abuse, gang fighting, poor housing and boredom. The now is seeing improvement in terms of new buildings being built like new housing and a community centre. We offer community services to the area, some of these are youth programs like JBB, after school clubs etc.
We have two-exchange programme with two countries in Africa. The first one is with Zambia for our youths and we had gone in July this year for three weeks to a town called Ndola on the Copperbelt province of Zambia. The group had ten young people and four leaders. The reason for this project is to look at two communities who have differences and similarities in terms of poverty issues, for example unemployment and gang fighting.
The second one is with Gambia which is our adult exchange programme and seven Gambians are currently in the country for their three weeks programme then in January next year a group of seven adult from our area will be going to the Gambia. WorId without walls will help us communicate effectively because it is not easy to communicate with either Zambia or Gambia since internet and phone facilities are not quite easily accessible for our partners. For our partners to receive a laptop makes a huge difference. Now we see ourselves following up activities that we have started to tackle progress from both sides. The theme for these exchange programmes is 'Together for a change'. The aim is to establish friendship and understanding as well as finding the way forward to solve some issues that people in these communities struggle with to lead normal lives. With this project we will send information of what we are doing to bring change to our local areas and probably lobby for help through showing our short films about our areas.
