Getting hotter every day

As we hear of the weather getting cooler in the UK, the temperature here is rising steadily. Today, and indeed for the last week or so I feel that I must be gradually melting away. I am running the fan all night at the moment, at least when there is power I am, and most of the time I am still too hot. I can feel the under sheet getting gradually damper as I shuffle about in the bed trying to get comfortable. Some people are predicting that the weather will break this week and the first rains will come. Others say we shall not see rain until near the end of November. We shall have to wait and see. During the day too I have been suffering a bit from the heat. I really hate it when the sweat runs down my face and into my eyes because the salt stings. I don't think I've ever experienced that at home. We are walking to work every day at the moment, mostly because petrol and diesel are in very short supply. By the time I arrive I can feel streams of water trickling down my back and in the area under my rucksack the fabric of my dress is soaking and sticks to my skin.

David and his Dad went off for a few days' break at the Lake last week. My task was to get my head down and finish the annotation of the Malawian ECD curriculum. On Friday I finally completed it and have printed out one copy. Soon we shall take it into town and get six copies photocopied and bound. Then David and I shall have one each and there will be one copy for each zone in the children's centre. David took the practical tasks for the third part of the Diploma on holiday to check over and comment upon. Rather to my surprise he actually did do more than half the checking, not really my idea of a holiday activity! So in a few days we should be able to produce a prototype Practical Assessment manual, NVQ – style but much more sensibly put together of course!!!

Tomorrow, and again on Thursday, we are running a short course on the use of displays in the Children's Centre. David has put together a presentation and I have dreamed up six display projects for small groups of students to put together. Saran and I will be up at 5.00am tomorrow so that we can get all the materials we need out of the storage container before 6.00am. We think this will be the best time because in the heat of the day it is utterly unbearable in the container, like being in an oven. We are quite worried about how well some of the stuff in the containers will survive. We imagine, melting plastic, bacteria multiplying rapidly in the warm paint and glue, toys and resources steadily cooking by day and cooling slightly by night, just to be heated up again the next day.

The choir has been practicing on four lunchtimes each week. The programme for our cd is gradually coming together with a mixture of English and Chichewa songs. Construction did assembly this week so the choir had to polish up a couple of pieces for public performance. I am still struggling with the Chichewa words but am making some progress. When Brian and Sue were here they made the choir a gift of uniform t-shirts, but there are a few members who do not have them so I have been charged with the task of finding out how to get some more. I discovered today that the company is called 'Glorious t-shirts!' The only contact is a mobile phone no. so I sent them a text, but no reply as yet! I had to cobble together an approximation to the uniform for the assembly of a pale yellow t-shirt and a black skirt. I possess neither item, so I had to ask around and borrow them. Zoe kindly came up with both items. To my utter amazement I was able to fit into them. Whoever would have imagined a year ago that I would have been able to borrow Zoe's clothes!! Indeed I got so many compliments I wore them all day!

We had a lovely relaxed weekend. On Friday night we watched a film together in the living room at Mitsidi. This was quietly companionable. Very pleasant! Nothing startling happened but we had a few invitations so I managed to go out for lunch with a Malawian family on Saturday and then move on to a barbeque party at David's in the High St in honour of the birthdays of two of our Malawian friends. We made them cards and birthday cakes. It was the first birthday cake Hellen had ever had! On Sunday four of us women went with Mary Kamwendo to a bridal shower for Chrissy who is an administrator at JPII. It was quite a grand affair with much dancing and throwing of money, and older women giving Chrissy useful advice on such themes as Grooming, Home Management and Ettiquette. In the evening Zoe and I were invited to supper with her landlady who runs a couple of nursery schools in Blantyre. Several other guests were also involved in Early Years work so we shared a lot of ideas and experience and I now have several other projects lined up to go and visit. I hope also to show some of them around the Children's Centre.

Shortages

Our most recent course was a look at planning early years provision using themes. The reason why David and I chose this as a subject for a short course is because as part of the exam, back in July, we set a planning task which involved suggesting a theme suitable for a group of under-5s of a particular age and then planning activities designed to support the children to gain the skills required to meet the milestones of the Malawian ECD curriculum in each of the four domains (Physical, Mental and Cognitive, Social and Emotional, and Moral and Spiritual). The whole exercise was threatened because about 85% of the students had no understanding of what we meant by the word theme. In fact we had to make radical changes to the marking scheme in order to be able to assess what the students knew and make sensible use of the results to that paper! I guess this is how you learn, neither of us has much experience of setting exams. Anyway we realized that although we knew that very few of the students had actually worked in nurseries before we had not taken into account what you pick up when you are on a placement in an Early Years setting. In UK all Early Years courses include periods of practical work with children, so it just would not have happened at home that we would have missed the fact that our students lacked this basic knowledge, add to this the fact that English is their second language and you have the explanation for why the situation arose.

I had an easy time for this course as David volunteered to put together a presentation so I was just there in the background helping the small groups of students to think about what a theme might be, and later to put together lists of suitable themes for various teaching purposes. I know it is not fashionable at home to teach in this way, but we are not looking at it as an alternative to basing activities on observed needs of individual children, but rather as complementary to it. When they finally start in the Children's Centre in January our students will all be new and inexperienced together and they must set up play spaces that are attractive and stimulating for babies, toddlers and young children. As products of the Malawian education system and its rote learning approach they are not the best at using their initiative and so we know that they need systems to help them to get to the right place at least at first. It is to be hoped that as they gain experience and see more ways of doing things they will gain in confidence and be able to take a more creative and original approach to planning.

In the afternoon we lightened the atmosphere and I used a grid technique that I learned thirty years ago with New Games UK, to show the students how to make up new games for themselves to support particular desired learning outcomes and themes. We had a few good ideas, but again it was more of a struggle than I expected. Again I blame the Malawian education system, originality is definitely not encouraged and students are afraid to make suggestions for fear of being ridiculed, or castigated for being 'wrong'. 'You have failed…' is all too common a phrase in Malawi. I would like to use the same technique with the EYPS students at home. I think it would be a way of developing quite exciting new games and activities.

Two weekends have passed since I last wrote. There is little option to get out of Blantyre at the moment as the fuel crisis is ever-deepening! When there is a rumour of fuel at a particular garage queues develop rapidly in both directions. Men bearing bright yellow jerry cans converge on the garage from around every corner and jump off every minibus. Adam, the volunteer whose job includes keeping all the trucks and JCBs, concrete mixers etc that Torrent hires out to other businesses on the road, sends the vehicles with the biggest tanks to join the local queues, but also looks at the possibility of obtaining fuel from wherever he can. Thus we have been making our own entertainment. Sarah and I went into Blantyre on the minibus on Saturday morning, sat in the garden of the Mount Soche Hotel with bottles of pop and then met up with Rita and Lyndsey to go shopping. We ended up in Lambats, the fabric shop, where we each bought cheap, lightweight cotton to get dresses made by the tailoring project. Then it was back to the Soche where we met David, Ged and Marc for lunch and frittered away the afternoon in idle chat, Greens and Mzuzu coffee. On Saturday Sarah, Lyndsey and I put together a good spread and invited all the volunteers and several other friends for a barbeque at Mitsidi. Despite the colour of the swimming pool being a deep bottle green, similar in shade to the water of the fish ponds, most of the younger volunteers jumped in and ensured that those of us who remained on the edge got as wet as they did by repeated bombing into the water. A few locals must have heard the splashing and came to join in and a good time was had by all.

The weather has finally settled into a steady succession of still, hot days. I am so grateful for the new classroom in JPIILITA which is so much cooler than the tin roofed library at St James' Primary school where David and I were based this time last year. Marc, who is teaching in Standard 1 up there at the moment arrives in our room at the end of the teaching day almost literally melting after being cooped up in a concrete box with about 80 children in the heat of the day.

The hammerkops have been working hard. The nest is now at least a couple of feet tall. It is a shaggy mound of sticks, leaves and grasses, browned by the sun. The entrance hole is towards the trunk of the tree over half way down the side so that the nesting place is completely enclosed and protected from the wind and weather. During the barbeque we observed Mr and Mrs Hammerkop getting intimate on more than one occasion, so we are hoping for eggs very soon. Unfortunately though, I shall not be able to see them from my vantage point at the top of the garden as the nest is so completely enclosed.

The turn of the Children's Centre to lead the Monday morning assembly rolled around again this week. I was a little anxious about it as when I asked for student volunteers I did not get even one. However I am sympathetic to them at the moment as for some at least it is very difficult for them during the wait for the Children's Centre to open, so I decided not to press the point and tackle the assembly in another way. Unfortunately David is on holiday and Marc is thoroughly committed at the time of the assembly to his teaching of Standard 1 at St James', so that left me, Sarah and Lyndsey. During the Children's Centre meeting last week we put our heads together and with David's help came up with a programme. Sarah gallantly agreed to find and read an appropriate Bible passage and fixed on Mark 10 13-16, the 'Suffer the little children' passage. Father John leant her a 'Study Bible' and we all liked the commentary for that passage which seemed to have something to say that was relevant to the way we are planning to teach in the Children's Centre, so she read that too. Lyndsey offered to find a suitable secular reading or poem and with a stroke of genius came up with 'Anyway' a verse which can apparently be found on the wall of the orphanage in Calcutta where Mother Teresa worked. David suggested that we illustrate how we are trying to teach Moral and Social issues such as cooperation and teamwork through games and fun, and get a few volunteers to take part in 'The Balloon Game' during the assembly. We needed someone to lead a prayer and, as our line manager, Vince was happy to be drawn in to the proceedings. That left only the introductions and links for me to do. I made a Trojan effort, with the help of Paul, my Chichewa teacher, and Yohane, and did these in Chichewa, which proved to be a popular decision and earned lots of applause on the day! Father John Dimba rounded everything off with a passionate reflection in Chichewa. He is such a good speaker but although I understood not a word, I thoroughly enjoyed the address, full of expression and gesture, and also the response of the congregation as they showed their approval of his message. The poem went down extremely well and was picked up by the MD in what amounted to a second reflection tacked on to the end of the assembly. Put all together this produced one of the longest assemblies in living memory, which I would not normally consider to be a good thing, but the feedback so far has all been appreciative, so I think we got away with it!

It is a fortnight since my last entry. The long gap is largely because I have been having further trouble with my laptop, getting repeated messages that a problem with the hard disk has been detected and to immediately back up everything. Yohane has been a star, but yet again he has had to back everything up, wipe the disk clean and start again. I am sick of having to hang about and I am sure he has better things to do. Unfortunately the period between him returning it to me and the next message was approximately 20 minutes, so I fear the damage may be terminal. I have now taken the precaution of copying the latest back up onto the office desktop. I must be disciplined about keeping it up to date! On top of this lie the usual Malawi troubles of intermittent internet services and slow download speeds.

During the last two weeks we have run two short courses, 'Outdoor Play' and 'Creative activities for babies, toddlers and young children'. David, Sarah and I have enjoyed seeing the students a bit more frequently. We have courses on three consecutive weeks during October. Sarah has welcomed the chance to contribute to the courses and thus begin to get to know the students, who will be her Care Givers in the Children's Centre. We divided the six hours available for the outdoor play course into three hours for babies and toddlers, led by Sarah and me, and three for 3-6s, led by David and Marc. We began our session by revising the types and stages of play, and the domains of the Malawian ECD curriculum. Sarah's lecturing debut comprised a short session looking at assessment of risk and we introduced the students to the 'Mother Teresa Children's Centre Activity Risk Assessment Form'. Then it was out into the bottom level of the Beehive Site for some practical play training. Oh the joys of teaching in a building site! We had taken a lot of trouble to discuss with Hugh (the engineer who coordinates the work of the building site) where the best location would be to do our outdoor play training. Of course in England no one would let a bunch of crazy early years' people anywhere near a building site, but this is Malawi! It certainly gave us plenty of opportunities for a practical look at risk assessment! There are only two open spaces on the site large enough to accommodate a couple of tutors and twenty or so students. Right down the bottom of the site on level 5, which when we looked at it with Hugh was a level, dusty plot of land containing virtually nothing, further up the hill on level 3 is a paved area in front of the admin building which accommodated all sorts of workmen involved in making and assembling vital parts of the construction and a couple of containers due to be removed to level 5; also this area is a busy route between admin and the rest of the site. We decided that although it was further from the classroom and messy from the point of view of dusty soil, level 5 would be much the more suitable area, and Hugh kindly helped us to collect together all sorts of potentially useful materials to encourage challenging learning opportunities out of doors. We piled up off cuts of wood including lengths of old scaffolding poles, tyres, hydroform blocks, planks, bricks, buckets, plastic trays and pipes, wood shavings… indeed anything we could glean, beg, borrow or steal from others on the site. Then Sarah and I made a raid on the container in which we keep materials donated for the Children's Centre and selected toys, paper, paints, writing materials, paddling pool, baskets, table cloths etc. A quick dash to the fabric shop to buy a few zitenje and we were well-equipped. On the day we divided the students into five groups and gave each group a task specifying the age of the children we wished them to provide outdoor play experiences for and the type of play we were looking for. We had baby play, heuristic play, an obstacle course, hide and seek play and a creativity day for toddlers. Sarah said she was pleasantly surprised by the activities the students put together considering that most of them, despite their theoretical knowledge, have never actually worked with children. I was proud of their efforts. Nothing stands still for long though, and between our discussion with Hugh and the day of the training, about 5 days, four or five containers had been moved to level 5 and the previously deserted area had become a route for trucks and dumpers moving equipment between containers, so we were contending with dust and traffic, not a great combination! On the Wednesday between the two training days we had unexpected heavy rain, so on the Thurday at least the dust was laid, but then we had mud…

We are in the midst of rather uexpected weather conditions. When I arrived in Malawi, this time last year, it was HOT! A few weeks ago while Annie was here the weather got steadily warmer and I thought we had seen the last of rain at least until November. We even had the fan on at night for a few days, but now it is back to needing not only a sheet, but a light quilt at night, and astonishingly according to the locals, we have had at least three periods of heavy rain. The locals assume me this is most uncharacteristic. This has caused Hugh and his team all sorts of headaches on the site and he has been kept awake at nights worrying about holes filling up with water! The landscape is still pretty brown, but the tones have deepened. Wet soil is darker and redder than dry. The new leaves are coming through now on many trees and I do not think it is my imagination that in the last few days they have visibly swelled and become more intensely green after the rain. To a European the seasons here are confusing. The last set of leaves has fallen during the last couple of months. Some of the big trees in the garden were bare of leaves for maybe a couple of weeks and then the first green blush of new leaves emerged. We had about a month of clear visibility of the birds, but now their cover is back, fresher and lusher, and getting better and better each day. A pair of hammerkops has built a huge, scruffy, straggly nest halfway up a tree at the end of Jacaranda Terrace. I can sit on my khonde and watch them as they fly assiduously back and forward all day collecting materials and weaving them into the nest. Last week I became very concerned as I saw nothing of them for two whole days and I feared that they had abandoned the nest, but they are back and working hard once again. I wonder where they went? Because the tree is rooted at the bottom of the bank by the stream which marks the boundary of Mitsidi, and because Jacaranda Terrace is at the top of the high bank the nest is not so very much higher than the houses and it is possible to look across directly into the nest and see the hammerkops at work. I am hoping I shall soon be able to see eggs and chicks. On the site the landscape gardeners have been at work and around the IT college there are flower beds and even a small lawn. At the same time Father John, as the new college Principal, has been smartening up the college with hangings made of the bright green chitenje material that was commissioned for the college opening and many potted plants in hanging baskets and planters. All these plants have loved the rain, and the weather has saved the gardeners from hours of watering! The lawn in front of the building is finer grass than is usually used here in Malawi and it was really struggling to become established, but now it has taken well and its feathery fronds are almost completely covering the plot.

To get back to teaching, the second course since I last wrote was about creative play opportunities for babies, toddlers and young children and we ran three parallel workshops, Sarah looking at babies, me at toddlers and David at 3-6 year olds. This approach had advantages and disadvantages as by the end of two days we had each run our own workshop six times and were beginning to lose the will to live! Sarah brought in her hotplate from Mitsidi and supervised the making of cooked playdough and Gloop! I put together a brief revision presentation combining what I thought they ought to know about Toddlers with what I thought they ought to know about creative play and then sent them off to play with seven different activities and answer a couple of lists of questions about safety and risk assessment, and play value and learning targets. It was fascinating to see the different ways in which each group of seven or eight students approached the task. Some groups all stuck together and discussed each question earnestly. Others split up into small groups and just played! I let them get on with it, and when it came to the feedback at the end there was not a noticeable difference in the general quality of the answers to my questions between the two approaches. Some groups easily identified which was the activity that was not really suitable for toddlers in the form in which it was presented, and some found it more difficult and I had to scaffold their thinking and help them work it out! We had some interesting discussions about the ethics of playing with food in the culture in which we are working, but for most people the reassurance that children were playing with substances that were completely safe if they put them in their mouths was more important than the idea of wasting foodstuffs. I was quite surprised about this as we have several students at the moment who are really struggling to find the money to buy food enough for themselves and their families. A friend sent me twenty pounds this week to spend as I saw fit amongst the students for whom the delay to the opening of the Children's Centre has caused real financial hardship, and I have paid a few minibus fares for students to get to training and bought some basic foodstuffs. It is impossible to be at all fair about this process, and after all twenty pounds does not go very far, but I suppose I must just hope that these small contributions go a short way towards making the waiting easier for those in the most difficult situations. Of course some students are more vocal than others, and some more truthful than others. There is no way of telling, and we must rely on instinct and the little information we have. I am sure I shall make mistakes, but if I do not try the money will lie in the drawer and be no use at all! David concentrated on the older end of his age range of 3-6 years and had the class making horses out of aluminium foil and building bridges out of newspaper and selotape. That is, he was much more focused on product than were Sarah and I. With little ones, process is everything!

This weekend it is Mother's Day here in Malawi so we have an extra day off on Monday. Next week we are going to work with the students to improve their planning skills, particularly considering the use of themes or topics to improve the quality of learning. This is not a fashionable approach in UK at the moment, but we feel that in the early stages it will help the students to provide a broad spectrum of high quality play activities while they are gaining experience with working with children, and while all the staff and children are new together. It is bound to take a while for everyone to get used to each other and settle down into good teaching and learning patterns. Again I shall look at this course as an opportunity for revision, consolidating previous work we have done on planning provision based on observations of children.

Socially, what have I been up to since Annie left? I have continued to attend choir practices whenever I can. Because of the dvd project with Father John Dimba we have stepped up our practice routine and now meet for half an hour at lunchtime on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. The first four songs have been selected and we are working on the next four. I am acting as go-between between the choir and Father John, as he is my next door neighbour. Next Wednesday he will be coming to practice to teach us one of the songs he wants to suggest for the dvd. I am really struggling with the songs in Chichewa, which is most of them. It is fine when I can read the words, but memorizing them is really difficult. One or two of the ladies have sort of adopted me and treat me a bit like a child with a learning delay, standing next to me and pointing at each word throughout the whole song. This is kind, but not entirely necessary; it is when I don't have the words that I am in trouble. This is all further complicated by the fact that one keen helper is a very strong soprano and I am a weak alto. I feel like a fraud being in the choir at all, but is fun, and I have been made welcome.

Since we returned from the Lake of Stars trip we seem to have been passing a bacterial stomach upset between us. We know it is bacterial because poor Lindsey, who arrived only a couple of weeks ago managed to get dehydrated and was briefly hospitalized while they sorted out what the problem was…This has meant that we have been feeling a bit rough for mush serious socialization! Also because the volunteer's car is out of action following the Lake trip and also the fuel shortage continues we are less mobile than usual. We have been steadily getting to know new volunteers. Linda and Hugh have made lots of contacts with other expats and this week, rather to our surprise, Chris and I found ourselves members of a quiz team at the meeting of the Wild Life Society of Malawi. There were 17 teams and we were 11^th! Since there were 10 prizes this was particularly galling, but at least we didn't completely disgrace ourselves even though we didn't exactly shine either!

This weekend was to have been a bit lively with invitations to a meal at Vishal's (one of our suppliers) this evening, a barbeque at Zoe's new flat tomorrow, and Mother's Day lunch at Mary's on Monday. Unfortunately the Malawian casual approach to planning means that Vishal has cancelled because he has gone to Lilongwe and Mary has changed the date of her party to Sunday so that it clashes with Zoe's with which I have promised to help, so my wild social whirl is reduced from three events to one! Boo Hoo!