FORMER TWO-WEIGHT WORLD champion Carl Frampton is no stranger to a scrap, but the 30-year-old Belfast boxer will visit Kenya next week to meet with children who are fighting for survival.
The Shore Road featherweight, who emerged bruised and bloodied having warred with Mexico’s Horacio Garcia at his home city’s SSE Arena last Saturday, will be joined by his wife Christine when he spends four days in the East African country.
The Framptons have been invited to the poverty-stricken region by Irish charity Trócaire to help raise awareness for its annual Christmas Appeal.
This year’s campaign, entitled ‘Until Love Conquers Fear’, aims to raise well north of €1m to help support thousands of people in some of the world’s most impoverished areas.
Carl and Christine Frampton will fly to Nairobi this coming Monday.
“We will visit a health clinic in Turkana in northern Kenya where mothers and babies go and get fed and weighed,” Carl Frampton told Belfast Live.
“We will also visit a centre that helps street children, and then that night we will see the ‘night children’.
These are kids from the outskirts, whose parents can’t afford to feed them so they send them off to the city to beg. That all stems from poverty, but then these kids are coming into the city where they come under even more danger – anything could happen to them.
“On the final day we return to Nairobi to visit the slums and get an idea of what these people have to go through every day.
“You see these images on your television screens, but to see them up close and personal will be a difficult experience. I think it will definitely affect Christine and me,” Frampton added, “but it’s for Trócaire’s Christmas Appeal, so hopefully we can raise as much publicity around the campaign and raise as much money as possible.
“It is only a week after my fight but I don’t mind.
“People say: ‘would you not rather be sitting by a pool or on a beach after a hard training camp and fight?’ But with two kids we were never going to be doing that anyway.
Having two kids of our own, I think it will be tough to watch these youngsters on the streets. Our daughter Carla is seven, and some of these kids on the streets, begging for food, area similar age. It will be hard to see, but it will also put things into perspective.
“You can’t prepare for these things.”
26,000,000 people are currently affected by the food crisis in East Africa – more than five times the population of Ireland and Northern Ireland combined.
You can donate to the Trócaire Christmas appeal here.
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