May 13, 2025 - 702 views
Former health visitor Catrin Evans is once again going the extra mile for vulnerable communities around the world.
Seventy-seven-year-old Catrin, from Llanfairfechan, and her husband Wesley have already raised more than £1,000 by taking part in a 70K in May challenge, as part of this year’s Christian Aid Week 2025.
Catrin said: “This year is a year of celebration and thanksgiving for us. We have already celebrated Wesley's 85th birthday, and at the beginning of May it was our ruby wedding anniversary.
“But more importantly, we want to celebrate the 80 years Christian Aid has been fighting poverty and injustice. Our challenge will reflect this - we aimed to complete 40k by our 40th anniversary, and the rest by the end of May. In addition we'll walk 5k to complete Wesley's 85th year.
“Our hill and coastal walks will be in solidarity with millions of people who have to walk long distances for clean water or to sell their produce, and the money raised will help communities fight the climate crisis.”
Money raised during Christian Aid Week will help the organisation’s partners empower vulnerable communities to find practical and sustainable ways out of poverty.
This year’s appeal - from May 11-17 - is focussing on work in Guatemala, in Central America, where climate change is causing the seasons to intensify and shift erratically. As a result, farming communities have to battle severe floods and, more recently, ferocious heatwaves. Water sources are drying up and vital crops are failing, plunging farming families into hunger and poverty.
Despite the challenges families are facing, the unstoppable power of hope drives people to look for ways to push back.
Christian Aid has been working with organisations like, Coordinación de ONG y Cooperativas, to offer training and tools so farmers can diversify and grow more resilient crops, build water recycling systems using household items, and create organic fertiliser. They are also supported with selling produce locally and campaigning for their rights against land grabs by industrial plantations.
Catrin has been a supporter of Christian Aid all her life and took her efforts to new heights when she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, raising £1,300.
As the charity marks its 80th anniversary this year, it is sharing memories of supporters like Catrin.
Catrin, was born in 1948 shortly before her parents moved to South Wales. Her father, Rev Erastus Jones, was a minister, and had just completed two years as a travelling secretary for the Student Christian Movement in Wales.
He took the job on the encouragement of Janet Lacey, who led Christian Aid in the 1950s and 60s and had seen Catrin’s parents’ involvement with gathering donations for refugees shortly after World War Two, when Christian Aid was founded.
Catrin said: “Dad was lucky enough to be sent in 1947 on a seven-week course at the Ecumenical Institute near Geneva, where he met people from all over the world who were working with youth organisations - people like Robert Mackey who started Inter Church Aid for our churches.”
Catrin recalls both her parents being involved with charity work: “I think one of my earliest memories was going with my mother, Eiluned Jones to take clothes for refugees. There was a little shop in the centre of our village with a tiny little room at the back where there was a large sack almost ready to be sent.
“In the early 1950s Dad set up a fellowship of churches and my mother and another lady got everybody involved in starting collecting for Inter Church Aid – the original name for Christian Aid.
“It was decided in our chapel that everybody would give a penny a week which started a system of volunteers visiting members to collect the money, and they all enjoyed the visits and getting together, and of course everyone gave more.
“I think that was the start of collecting.
“The first house-to-house collections must have been around 1956. Our chapel and others were involved and it was my mother who organised that - I remember tins being in the house.
“Both my parents were pacificts, and Dad was a conscientious objector during the war so they saw this as part of their duty as Christians.
“My mother was not one to push herself forward with things but she was fully committed to this. She wrote a letter to the weekly paper about a family of refugees who were in Italy. The father had been given the chance to go to America but the mother had Tuberculosis, so she and the children couldn’t leave. She ended up taking her own life so that the children could go.
“It seems this letter pushed things forward in a lot of churches.”
Catrin was part of a youth fellowship which raised money in various ways, including carol singing. And it was a Christian Aid film which inspired her, at a young age, to go into nursing.
“They were showing nurses in Africa and I said I’d like to do that,” she explained. “I later moved to London for a time and became a member of a church off the King’s Road, in Chelsea. Chelsea was very much into Christian Aid Week.
“Ragnor Walk was very central so everything took place in our church.
“We took a barrel organ round and we got to see the differences in areas. There were the houses where maids answered the door and said ‘no’ and the mews where people wouldn’t come down but shouted from the windows, and then the Peabody estates where people donated pennies.”
Before she married, Catrin went travelling and it was on one of these trips that she took on her biggest challenge.
“In 1982, I was going to quite far away places. I booked a safari holiday in Tanzania and there was an option to add a four day climb of Kilimanjaro.
“I decided to take the plunge and do it and I thought in order to encourage me I would make it a sponsored climb.
“The Christian Aid organiser in North Wales Rev Owen Owen helped me and my mother got involved so it became a national thing. For four months I carried a clipboard with me everywhere I went. The organiser died suddenly just before I left and so I took a piece of Welsh slate with his name on up the mountain with me and left it on the top. It was good going up, doing about 3,000ft at a time. It got more difficult when we got to the last hut at 15,000 feet because we were beginning to feel the effects.
“We spent a few hours trying to sleep then climbed the last bit in the dark so we would see the sunrise. I remember trying to move my legs and thinking I can’t do this. I was in a panic when I couldn’t feel my feet. Then I ate some Kendall Mint Cake someone had given me, and I thought about the people who were sponsoring me.
“It was exhausting and the next day I could hardly move. It took me a while to really appreciate what we’d achieved. We collected just under £1,300 and I chose a mother and baby Christian Aid project in Tanzania to donate it to.
“At that time I was a health visitor in north Wales and started getting involved in collecting which I did on my estate which I did until I was asked to take over the running of it in our town, which I’ve done ever since.
“It used to be all about house-to-house but Covid put a stop to that and now we still have the envelopes but we fundraise in other ways as well with things like sponsored walks. During Covid lockdown Christian Aid Week, my husband and I ascended and descended 800ft from our house into the hills above, every day during the week – 4,800 ft in all and were sponsored by friends and relatives online.
“Looking back, there was not a time when I didn’t know the Welsh word for refugees and I suppose Christian Aid is in my DNA really.”
To support Catrin and Wes, please go to https://fundraise.christianaid.org.uk/challenge-2025/wesley-and-catrins-celebration-challenge and to find out more
