New courses and Chichewa lessons

Here I am at the end of the third day of courses three and four. We have 60 new students and I have started again on the huge task of learning everyone's name. I seem to be doing rather better this time and am making even more of an effort to play name games. At the end of Tuesday I felt pretty confident, but this was soon shattered when they all came in wearing different clothes this morning!! We are trying to repeat the course in exactly the same way that we presented it before in order to give everyone as equal a chance as possible. It is impossible not to make small changes and David and I are in a different place from the one we were in when we stood in front of course one for the first time. I am not so afraid that I will find it difficult to understand the students when they speak to me. Now I know that there will be words and phrases that I do not get at once, but when I ask the students will patiently repeat them and then laugh affectionately at the foolish azungu who does not understand her own language! The Chichewa names are more familiar too and I can now spell Chiwemwe and Tiwonge without asking for help, although I did ask a woman with an apparently unpronounceable name to spell it this afternoon and it turned out to be Jacqueline! Both the new groups have a lot of energy and enthusiasm. We did Physical Development today and David played some fast and competitive games which were entered into with great gusto by girls and boys alike. Lindy remarked that in a mixed group like that in England there would always be girls who would not participate for the sake of their hair or their nails, but this group included 50% women aged between 17 and about 48 and everyone took part in every game. Even I had to play ladders which I don't think I have done since I was in the Brownies! Yesterday we repeated the session which looks at the purpose of education and asks the students to look very closely at what they expect the education system to deliver to their children by different phases in their lives. Then I told them what the Malawian Government expects ECD centres to deliver in the way of a syllabus. Noone in the room had ever seen the syllabus book before, not even Maureen who runs her own nursery school, or the ladies who work for various charities who support young orphans! On Monday they thought in detail about what it is that children need and we related what they said to Maslow's Hierarchy.

I do not think that I have told you that we have started Chichewa lessons. We have found a teacher called Paul who has taken on the task of giving Jan, Lindy, David and me two lessons a week on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. He is a very serious young man and does not always understand when David teases him. He began to teach us in a very logical way starting with the verb to be and the first of seven or eight classes of nouns. This first lesson solved a problem for me in that I had been wondering why the word for white person, which is spelled mzungu, is called out in the street by all the children as 'azungu, azungu' every time we walk past. It turns out that the first class of nouns all begin with m, which is replaced by a to pluralise them. Hence one mzungu, many azungu. It turns out that rather like the French tu and vous it is customary to pluralise where you wish to show respect, thus children calling out to me on the way home from work call 'Azungu' whether I am alone or with David or Lindy! I have told Paul that I wish to learn the same first 500 words in Chichewa that babies learn so that when the Children's Centre opens in July I can communicate with the children directly. At first he thought that I was joking, but I am not. I think he understands. I enjoy the lessons, but I am not very good at doing any homework so am not sure how well I shall progress.

Evenings are a bit dominated by marking the exams and assessments for courses one and two at the moment. Lindy has devised a wonderful, colour coded system to mark the creativity test. David and I are ploughing through the written test papers. I cannot decide whether I have set the standard too high or whether I have misjudged how difficult a group of people may find it to apply their learning when they are used to learning by rote. Actually some of them have not been very good at learning by rote either! There have been a few papers that have given me a warm glow of pride, but more than a few I fear that have caused me to wonder whether they have listened at all to what we have had to say! Anyway I cannot change the course too much and still give everyone an equal chance to get on to the next one. But it certainly will not do any harm to do quite a bit of revision on the Intermediate course.

Lindy and I left David to his lecturing this afternoon, borrowed a car and ran away to town to get some craft materials for tomorrow. We found a rather delightful mini factory that makes handmade paper and tomorrow we shall make multicoloured birds to hang from mobiles. Whilst in town we made a hasty visit to Ryalls Hotel for lunch. This is a very smart and expensive place to eat, but we decided to treat ourselves and it was absolutely delicious! Lindy thinks we should do it once a month and I must say I do not think that it is a bad idea! We actually took a photo of the portion of bread that Lindy ordered as it looked so beautiful, presented with dark balsamic vinegar, golden olive oil, rock salt and coarsely ground black pepper. We both had delicious salads, mine with smoked salmon on a bed of Waldorf salad and Lindy a goat's cheese terrine. Mmmmmmm cheese!! Marty, who is going home in a couple of weeks said last night, ' Never again in my life will I take cheese for granted!' Already I know absolutely what he means.

It is raining hard again as I write, but it is still pretty hot. Yesterday it was 37 degrees again. I am thinking of you all in negative temperatures and hope you are able to keep warm and cosy!