Following the presentations which the students made for the midway assessment last Wednesday we followed the pattern of the first two courses and looked at Play and Planning. I swapped the two sessions around so as to give myself an extra evening to prepare David's session on Observe, plan, do, review, assess. It is never easy to deliver from someone else's lecture notes, sometimes I think it is better just to start again from the beginning. However I did not. I guess when you write your own notes you have in your head all the little anecdotes that bring the theory to life and help the students to remember what it is you want them to learn. It is not always so easy to fit these into someone else's structure, however good their lecture is when they deliver it themselves! Anyway, both went pretty well in the end.
I had a pretty good weekend; quite sociable and friendly. Saturday was graduation day for the Beehive diploma students in IT, Leadership and Tailoring. It was a very hot morning and Zoe and I were running slightly late and therefore a bit harassed. We put our posh frocks on in honour of the situation and jumped in a Land Rover and set off! We arrived about ten minutes after the event was due to start to find that we need not have worried, as the guest of honour, some side-kick of the President, whose palace is just the other side of the hill, had been taken on a guided tour of the Beehive building site by Peter Nkarta. The hall was packed by the graduands in robes and mortar boards, children were running everywhere, everyone was dressed in their best. Vince appeared at first in a smart suit and later, together with other bigwigs of Beehive in special gowns with red silky trimmings. The chief of Chilomomi was there, and there was an individual gown for her too, this time trimmed in yellow and green. I am not sure of the significance of this but as the whole hall was done out in green and yellow hangings, ribbons and potted plants I guess green and yellow must have some significance for Chilomoni. I don't suppose it was for Norwich City in my honour! By the time the dignitaries arrived back from their jolly jaunt to the site, the Indian women in the row next to me were hopping mad, they had been told the event started at 8.00am, we had expected 9.00 am and it actually started at about twenty past ten, but this is Malawi! Malawians certainly seem to know how to do celebrations. The graduands processed into the hall in a double rank to loud African rhythms. Gyrating their hips and with smiles that reached right across their proud faces. There were several fulsome speeches from Vince and Peter, the bigwig from the government, who turned out to be quite a feminist and was quite entertaining, and from the local MP. Jan was the Master of Ceremonies. He got in a bit of a mess with some of the Malawian names, but generally presented himself very creditably. The bigwig presented about a hundred and fifty certificates. Each graduate was met in the aisle by a small crowd of proud relatives who hugged and kissed and celebrated with great energy. Half the time the next graduate whose name was called had trouble getting past the relatives of the previous one in order to receive his certificate. There was much applause and cheering. I think we could learn a lot from Malawians about making occasions joyous. Zoe and I were surrounded by small Malawian children who all wanted to touch the azungu women! I picked up a tiny mite so she could see over the crowd and was then expected to pick up an ever increasing queue of little people one by one! During the presentation Zoe and I passed a small girl between our laps as there were not enough chairs for her to have one to herself. It was too hot to have her all the time. It was like having a wriggly hot water bottle on my knee!
In the afternoon Zoe and I went shopping with her friends, Lewis and Gift and their two year old daughter. Lewis works as a driver for Beehive. Zoe wanted to buy the little girl some new clothes for Christmas and she ended up with two little outfits, a pair of pink shoes and a doll that squeaked when she shook it! She was one happy little girl by the time we had finished!
The evening was taken up with a goodbye party for a friend of Gemma's, an Australian who has lived in Malawi for about five years. There were people there from many countries, but the only Malawian I saw was the barman! The food was terrific; the party was held in a Chinese restaurant. There were all sorts of dishes and the crab claws in ginger were to die for!
On Sunday I went to Gemma and James' again and Gemma had a go at cutting my hair. She did a good job too, I was very pleased with it and came away feeling a lot less shaggy! Gemma and Zoe and I went to the cinema in the evening and saw Eat, Pray, Love and finished up getting Pizzas for supper. The cinema was just like an English one! Most of the clientele were azungu or Indian which I suppose is not surprising as the price of the tickets was roughly the same as in England which equates to eight days pay for a labourer on the Beehive building site.
The last week of the course simply flew by. Lindy had a go at lecturing on Monday which gave me a bit of break which I filled by drawing up the exam timetables for Friday. We planned to follow the same pattern for courses three and four that we used for one and two so it was a fairly straightforward job. Lindy did the session on meeting children's basic care needs. She is a very visual learner herself and she took a bag of visual aids to help the students remember the main points of the lecture and she successively pulled out of a bag, two plates which she weighed on each hand to represent a balanced diet, a water bottle, a toilet roll , I can't remember what she had for sleep, clearly my own learning style is different!
On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I did Child Protection, Caring for Babies and Professional Partnerships respectively. The afternoon group was particularly challenging on Tuesday and we got involved in a complicated discussion about what exactly constituted physical abuse. There were several upright Christian men in the group who considered that certain children require beating in order to keep them on the straight and narrow. I had to be very careful not to seem disrespectful of a culture so new to me that seems to accept such things, but I managed to keep it impersonal and based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which both UK and Malawi have signed. It was pretty exhausting though. I also had to discuss Child Labour, Child Trafficking, Stigma and Discrimination, and Harmful Cultural Practices as well as the more familiar, Neglect, Physical, Emotional and Sexual Abuse. The afternoon group was the only one that asked me to spell out what female genital mutilation is as well. There was a moment when I thought they might be deliberately making it difficult for me, but Lindy says I coped with it OK and I have decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. Fortunately I had done my homework and my slides were based on the Malawian National Syllabus for Early Childhood Development, so I could blame that if they didn't agree with me! Vince and Peter paid the groups a visit on Thursday and explained how the idea for the Children's Centre came about and put it in the context of the rest of the Beehive projects. Group four were the only ones to ask what the salaries are going to be and one of my greatest challengers failed to turn up for the exam next day despite not having missed any of the sessions. I wonder if he thought the money was just not enough to make the effort of taking the exam worthwhile.
On Wednesday night we went to Ryalls, the posh hotel, again for a leaving do for Zoe and Jonathan. I had butternut squash cannelloni, with cheese (mmmm Cheese!) and spinach, followed by sorbet which came in a brandysnap basket and was accompanied by fresh fruit, chopped very fine and shaped in a dariole mould.
Exam day went pretty well. There was a hitch because an invigilator we booked up three weeks ago arranged to do something else and failed to tell me, but we managed to get a substitute and although we ran ten minutes late throughout there was no more serious outcome. Lindy did sterling work with the creativity test and Chaliza did David's interviews, and everything ran pretty smoothly. The toys made in the creativity test were notably better than those done by courses one and two. We think that this is because we have done a bit more painting, drawing etc, and a bit less playing of physical games since the container was unpacked and we had paints etc. The classroom is now papered with posters on flip chart paper made cooperatively by groups of four or five students, on meeting the basic care needs of children, and on children's rights. During the Caring for babies session we got them to make things to hang over babies' cots to provide sensory stimulation so now the classroom is festooned with mobiles of coloured card, crepe paper and natural materials such as Flame Tree pods and mahogany seeds.
Today I resolved that I would have a whole day without doing any work at all, and I have managed to do it! I woke early and was up by six and had the house tidy and reorganized and a great pile of ironing done by nine. Zoe and Jonathan have departed for home for Christmas, leaving me and Jan and Lindy as the only volunteers remaining at Mitsidi. This has left me as the sole resident in the two semi-detached houses, Flame and Baobab. I have reluctantly locked the connecting door between the two, and have rushed around making the space my own in Flame. I miss Jonathan and Zoe, but am making the best of it. I have hung up my pictures and a couple of chitenges so the place is looking bright. The digital photo frame that Jack gave me for my birthday was in the box from the container so I have rigged that up to show my folders of photos in random order. Today I have been surprised to see how many photos of pre=school children I have taken over the last three years or so. I have also been delighted by reminders of family occasions such as Toni and Andy's wedding and enjoyed pictures of my own children in Westonbirt Arboretum, Pensthorpe and the back garden, to name but a few. I have been reminded of days out with Karl all over Norfolk and beyond.
This morning Jan, Lindy and I went to African Habitat, a shop which is just what you would imagine it to be with a title like that and bought, among other bits and pieces a small evergreen tree each, so now I have a mini real Christmas Tree in my sitting room. I have made a few decorations out of sequins and coloured card and it looks quite festive. Under Zoe's little Baobab tree I now have three presents waiting for Christmas day. Deb sent me a delightful little Advent Calendar which arrived this week so I have enjoyed opening several windows a day in order to catch up. It doesn't feel quite right though: Too hot!
Lindy and I spent a happy couple of hours making decorations this afternoon, and then invented spaghetti with butternut squash, tomato and chilli sauce for supper. This was followed by 'Granny Boyd's' biscuits which we made following a recipe discovered by Lindy. They turned out to be chocolate shortbread and were very good.
Tomorrow the marking begins. We shall have to work hard to get the results out by 23 Dec which is what we have promised to try to do, but it would be good to have it all out of the way before Christmas.
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