Save when you spend £50 at Waitrose Patrick Barclay Where am I It had been a long journey: first a plane to Johannesburg and
then a bone-jouncing drive by jeep to a remote village. As they approached it down a dusty track, Virginia Prifti heard an unexpected sound. For a second, she couldn’t make it out then she recognised the peal of playground laughter. Its source was soon evident: dozens of children had climbed onto a roundabout in a dusty school playground and were being spun round by their playmates. But Prifti’s eye had been caught by something else. Above the roundabout was a large metal water tank – and on the tank was a picture of her son Lawrence. Three years earlier he had died, aged eight, from adrenoleuko-dystrophy (ALD), a rare degenerative condition that first came to public attention through Lorenzo’s Oil, the 1992 film. Prifti, 50, had known for some time that his illness was terminal, and she was determined to mark his short life. In April 2005, when she read an article in The Sunday Times by Christina Lamb about “magic roundabouts”, she knew she had found the answer. The roundabouts, she learnt, were simple devices that harnessed the energy of children at play to power a pump. This in turn raised clean drinking water from below ground – a lifeline for remote villages in Africa.
Lawrence died at home in July 2005. About a fortnight later, Prifti wrote to her friends and relatives, asking them to make a donation in memory of Lawrence to Roundabout Outdoor, a South African charitable company that installs and maintains the pumps.