"Charity is a very Victorian notion — the further away people are, the more charitable we feel towards them," says Thompson with not a little asperity. "By my thirties I was thoroughly disenchanted by celebrity charity stuff — I just can’t bear it!" she says with a groan. Loathing the lunches-‘n-launches celebrity circuit, Thompson was looking for a way to make a more meaningful contribution.

The wave of floods hammering southern Africa, from Angola in the west to Madagascar in the east, has displaced hundreds of thousands, destroying homes and schools and creating fears of disease outbreak. That’s the bad news. The good news is that governments and aid organisations operating in the region have learned from the devastating floods of 2000/01.

Every year tens of thousands of children walk across borders and swim across rivers to escape poverty, abandonment and a lack of hope. Children as young as nine undertake terrifying journeys to cross borders illegally, convinced that life must be better elsewhere. For many, the dream is short-lived and they find themselves battling for survival, exploited and abused.

The road to Dowa could be any road in rural Malawi. Subsistence farmers scratch out a living from desiccated, exhausted soil and pray for the rains to arrive soon. The blackened stubs of trees are mournful witnesses that this area was verdant indigenous woodland not so long ago. Now their function as recyclers of moisture is lost and the water that evaporates simply disappears. Rainfall has diminished and the rivers have shrunk to muddy trickles.

It is predicted that by the end of the century, a barrel of water will cost more than a barrel of oil. In cities such as Dar es Salaam and Delhi, the taps often run dry and women spend hours every day looking for water to buy from tankers and vendors. In the rural areas this is often not an option, and available water must be harvested from rainfall or rivers without wasting a precious drop.