No wonder Christie hasn’t been around
It doesn’t seem long ago that Christie Faulks, one of Doncaster’s best sprinters in the past decade, made a clean sweep of the sprints in the Women’s 40-44 age-group at the Victorian Championships.
Faulks ran a meritorious 64.9 in winning her 400 and looked set for even bigger things but suffered a leg injury soon afterwards and dropped out of competition. She has made an occasional visit to Doncaster in the interim, promising to come back to competition, but hasn’t managed to do so.
But after looking at her newly established website it’s not difficult to work out why.
Faulks, 51, and her daughter Tessa visited Kenya in 2009 and returned with wonderful stories of running in the famous Rift Valley, which is renowned worldwide as the ‘nursery’ which just keeps turning out champion distance runners.
Her relationship with Kenya had begun much earlier, however, when, in 1988, as a young teacher, she worked there with an international mission organization, teaching in a secondary girls’ boarding school.
‘I traveled to Kenya believing I would use my teaching skills and experience to help others,’ she said recently.
‘Ha..! I returned home much humbled. I had been the student – the girls, the school and the culture were my teachers.’
Christie Faulks at work in Kenya
Faulks has worked with a missionary family, a doctor and his wife, in the regional centre of Naivasha, in developing a support network for the countless women and children who are in dire need of assistance.
Faulks describes Minalyn, the doctor’s wife, as ‘a ball of faith’.
‘She takes prostitutes, disabled women and the homeless into her home, feeds them and teaches them craft and sewing skills,’ she says.
‘The income from the items they make is returned to them as a weekly wage and the women, many of them HIV+, are able to support themselves for the first time in their lives.’
Another initiative has been to encourage five and six-year-olds to attend school by giving them a nutritious breakfast when they arrive.
‘Most of them were too weak to be able to sit up for the whole morning, so they couldn’t learn,’ she explains. ‘Since we’ve introduced the breakfast program there has been a dramatic drop in absenteeism and the opportunity is there for many more children to start an education.’
Faulks says her ‘ultimate dream’ is to secure sufficient sponsorship to allow SOSK to establish a training centre which would provide physical relief and protection, teach women income-producing skills and create a change in their outlook by stimulating accomplishment, pride and the development of strong ideals.
We keep hoping we’ll see Christie back at the track sometime soon. But it seems she’s a bit busy.
Further information is available from the SOSK website, http://www.sosk.org.au/
Christie Faulks wins the W40 100 metres at the Vic Champs 2005