Cork Local Papers Anne Marie Kelly
Posted by Valerie Craigie on 17 Nov 11
Anne Maire Kelly is on her fourth Niall Mellon Township Trust Blitz. The Carlton Kinsale Hotel & C-Spa General Manager was so committed to returning this year that she took out a personal loan just to get to Witsand Township to help build houses, change lives and have the best craic in the world. As Red team leader she came equipped with enough Barry’s tea and purple snack bars to feed the entire 600 Irish for the entire week, all donated by the Carlton Kinsale hotel. Next year she hopes to wrangle her new employers at Carlton to help fundraise, she also has an idea to bring a local Witsand Marathon runner Sandile Gebenga whose house the Orange team is helping to build back to Ireland to run a race to help the charity kick off it’s fundraising for next year. Sandile came second out of 14000 people running in the Cape Town Marathon and the night he returned with his medal he found his shack had been burnt down and one of his children badly burned. At the end of the week’s building blitz Sandile, his wife Nolwando and his three children will have a safe and secure home and if Anne Marie has anything to do with it and supported by the charity and The Carlton Hotel Group he’ll have an all-expenses paid trip to Ireland to do the thing he loves and to fundraise so that he can help the Irish help his people. Anne Maire Kelly is the life and soul of the Red team, the Cork beauty is always bantering, smiling and laughing but when it comes to the work she’s doing she is deadly serious. ‘I’ve seen the results,’ she says, ‘and like The Terminator I’ll always be back.’