The Harrogate Fire Ants are raising money to improve sanitation on the small island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific.
The Port Vila Fire Ants, Vanuatu, came to the Harrogate Fire Ants attention in April 2020, when they discovered they shared the same name.
Along with New Zealand based charity the Butterfly Trust, the Harrogate team are now fundraising to build toilets, hand washing stations and clean water pumps from materials sourced in Vanuatu.
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Chair of the Harrogate Team, Stuart Morris said:
“We realised quite quickly that locals in Vanuatu struggle a lot. They suffer from typhoons which are often category 5, knocking out entire infrastructures. We wanted to do something that would benefit them and raising money gives the locals a decision of how we can help, like what they want doing and where.
We share the same name so we are just us two, just 9,800 miles apart!”
Rugby League for Harrogate
The Harrogate Fire Ants were only established in April 2020 as an attempt to encourage rugby league in the Harrogate area.
Since then, they have already gained a spot to play at Ashville College, where former New Zealand and Leeds Rhinos league player, Gary Mercer is head of rugby.
Mercer is the liaison between the team and Ashville and will be offering a coaching session for the Fire Ants. In the off season for rugby league, Ashville’s rugby team will be using the Fire Ants for training and fitness.
The Harrogate Fire Ants say that starting a rugby league team hasn’t been the easiest, and said they faced some difficulties setting up a league team in a union dominated area.
Stuart Morris, Chairman of the Harrogate Fire Ants said:
“The hardest part was trying to work around the differences between league and union in this area. Ideally we wanted to be in Starbeck but there wasn’t enough space so we’ve moved from Rossett to Knaresborough until we finally got space at Ashville College in Harrogate.”
The team are due to start training again on May 4.
