Locals with heart.

Launceston residents Ian and Lee Campbell recounted, around our Hearth, about their experiences of building a school in Haiti for underprivileged children.

“These kids have nothing to eat. Their mothers mix dirt with cooking oil to make biscuits,” Ian said.

“In the west, we just can’t get away from wanting more and more,” Ian said.

“People think the Bible says ‘money is the root of all evil’, but it doesn’t. It says, ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’”. He said the Haitian people didn’t have the same attachment to material items that the west had.

They had battled slavery, recurring natural disasters and western pillaging of their country, yet they would give you their last meal without complaint. He recounted seeing a woman walking along the side of the road with a coconut in each hand and one on her head. Seeing them passing by, the woman walked up to the car and offered them a free coconut.

“She had barely anything to feed her family, but thought of our needs as strangers,” Ian said.

Lee and Ian at The Hearth of Chudleigh.

Baptists, Ian and Lee, enjoy doing what they can for those less privileged, providing assistance to children all over the world through the connections they have with their church.

They are also nature lovers and artist, Lee, paints and Ian enjoys capturing the beauty of Tasmania, through the lens of his camera.

In fact, the pair was in Chudleigh photographing the majestic eagle that makes its home here and Ian took a wonderful photo of one of the pair in the macrocarpa trees near the Showground.

The Chudleigh General Store is now selling the couple’s artwork as cards in the shop. Those on holiday can now write their card while enjoying a meal, buy a stamp and leave it at the counter to be picked up by mailman Errol for posting, as an old-world convenience. The shop also sells postcards from Mole Creek photographer, Karen Myles.