In May Neville Taylor our soprano cornet player travels to Mozambique to do some voluntary work (some call it hard labour) on a school building project. Neville works for Scott Wilson Ltd, an international engineering consultancy with two offices in Derbyshire, at Matlock and Chesterfield. School building work will be funded by the Scott Wilson Millennium Fund, a charity established in 2000. Project partners Quest Overseas who have established links with the local community over several years will be managing the project on site. Neville and thirteen other volunteers from Scott Wilson offices across the UK will be joining Mozambique tradesmen to commence the building work. Similar teams will be going out from the UK in June and July to help complete the project. Ravaged by a bloody civil war in the 1980s Mozambique officially became the poorest country in the world. Since then, there has been a surge of investment in a number of industries including tourism however, a lack of basic education in rural areas means that many communities have gained little benefit to date.   

Neville and his colleagues will be working in the Bamboozi community at Tofo near the provincial town of Inhambane where existing school facilities amount to two small grass huts which are no use during poor weather, and a couple of blackboards. There is no furniture and very few books. This is to be replaced with a furnished three room school building for 200+ children, and Scott Wilson are hoping to maintain contacts with the school in the future, including help with books and stationery.