Keighley teenager Beth McPhail returns home on Friday, August 21, after a year in Africa.

Beth has been working with orphaned and abandoned children in an SOS children's village in Zimbabwe.

Beth, 19, whose year as a volunteer was arranged through Project Trust, has been helping to look after some of the 120 children aged up to 16 who live in the village in Bulawayo.

The village is one of 370 SOS Children's Villages throughout the world which provide a permanent family home for impoverished children who have no one else to care for them.

A former pupil at Skipton Girls' High School, Beth will be going on to university in the autumn to study psychology.

Before then, however, she will be catching up with family and friends and the local organisations and businesses who supported her year in Zimbabwe - and generously contributed to her appeal for funds to help care for the once-destitute children whose home is now in Bulawayo.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.