A WOMAN has kitted out an African village's football team after seeing children playing with a paper ball while on holiday.

Christine Douglass, from South Pelaw, near Chester-le-Street, visited the remote village of Mukuni, in Zambia, on holiday last September.

She was travelling on an organised tour of South Africa and the Victoria Falls when the group visited Mukuni with a local guide, where they learned about the 700-year history of the village and its 5,000 inhabitants.

But Miss Douglass, a quality controller at a catering company in Sunderland, said the memory of children playing with a homemade football stayed with her.

She said: "The children were very friendly, they made you feel so welcome and showed you their school books and the work they had been doing.

"But it was the poverty that struck me. A few of us on the tour left some of the clothes we had taken with us and donated them to the villagers.

"Some 800 children attend the local school and the day I visited, several were playing football with a makeshift papier-mch ball. The memory of the children playing stayed with me long after returning home and I decided that however small my contribution, I would try to make a difference."

She bought a couple of footballs, a pump, exercise books, pens and collected donations of about three dozen football strips.

The gifts were then handed over by the tour operators, Travelsphere Holidays, who had organised Miss Douglass' trip.

The children received the gifts at a presentation, hosted by the headmaster of the school and attended by several hundred villagers.