Lyson Willard's Story
My name is Lyson Willard from Madisi. I am 22 years old and was the third child born in a family of four children. Life was good when my father was around, but things changed when he died in the year of 2009. At that time, I was still very young, and my mother had to take the whole responsibility of taking care of us. She used to wake up early in the morning in order to look for piece work and if she didn’t find any, we were going to bed without eating. We used to grow maize in our small garden, but the harvest was not enough to cover us the whole year because we had no fertilizer to apply to our crops.
Due to the challenges my family was facing at that time, my mother was not able to pay for our school fees, which meant I had to drop out of school when I was in form 2. I thank God I saw hope when I joined the United Methodist Church and I praise God that by his grace, I am in the youth Vocational and apprenticeship program doing mechanics at Deof Motors.
I have acquired a lot of knowledge and am able to fix some faults in cars on my own. I also do some piece work here at Deaf Motors and am able to assist my mother buying food and clothes. I would like to thank the church here in Madisi for giving me this opportunity to be one of the youth to benefit from this program. I also thank the Malawi Annual Conference for giving us second chances since we dropped out of school. Lastly, I also want to thank the Church for sponsoring this Program.