A snapshot view of the Children’s Centre.

Normally I would never write in my blog during working hours, but then at the moment it feels as though if I am awake I am working, at least during the week, so perhaps I may be excused! This morning I spent an hour working my way along the corridor from the 4-6 year old room, through the 2-4s and ended up with the baby room. It was an hour that made the hard work all worthwhile, and as I write I am feeling quite emotional! I began by assessing a student on a task about risk assessment of activities. She is one of our youngest students but she is bright and thoughtful and intuitive and it was the quality of her relationships with the children in her room that moved me. She had organized these children into a game of Phada, a Malawian street game a bit like Hopscotch. It's quite challenging for 4-6s, especially the younger ones and I watched with great respect as she adapted her approach and level of support to meet the needs of each individual child. Those children did everything for themselves, including drawing a rather wobbly chalk line court on the concrete floor of the room. The student was full of praise, suggestions and warmth. For those who were less well physically coordinated she was there, jumping alongside them, others more physically confident jumped alongside each other. The classrooms tend to be rather echoing, all that concrete and not enough soft furnishings to absorb much sound and often I have heard students raise their voices to be heard, then the children also speak loudly and the volume of sound escalates. Not today, she spoke softly, focusing her attention on the children and involving them in preparing the activity. Everyone was interested and kept quiet to hear her. It was lovely! Oh and she had made a sensible assessment of the hazards as well and put in appropriate measures to minimize the risks!

When I had finished there I popped next door to the toddlers. This is a room that has been a little slow to get enough good quality activities planned to keep the children productively occupied all the time, and this is the room where we have had a few problems with staff relationships with each other, and the apparent lack of ability to behave in a professional way in front of the children, so I was thrilled to see three interesting looking activities being prepared all at the same time by Care Givers who appeared to be working well as a team! There were clay balls, brightly painted with thick powder paint, drying on the side of the play sink. I wonder what they were for. There were painting trays on the floor ready to be used, each lined with a rectangle of newspaper cut with a zig-zag border. A Care Giver was cutting out cross-shaped pieces of paper for the children to decorate with patterns as she wanted to find out what degree of fine motor control each child has. It is so good to see activities getting more interesting and original as Care Givers gain in experience and confidence that their own ideas are going to be good ones.

Next I looked in on the baby room just as their morning welcome routine began. It was an absolute delight. I sat on a chair in the corner of the room and watched. The first songs welcomed the babies individually by name, first in Chichewa and then in English. Each song was paired so there were two days of the week songs, two about today's weather, two naming body parts etc, each time one in English and one in Chichewa. These children, all under-two and a half were obviously already familiar with these songs. They helped themselves to instruments and played along enthusiastically and in rhythm so much better than the average UK child in a baby room. Little Ireen is a music and dancing star, her small face lights up with pleasure as soon as a tape is turned on or a Care Giver begins to sing. She swings her hips in perfect rhythm and plays along with drum or tambourine. Today she had helped herself to a tambour (? I think that's what you call it when it has no bells) and a fluorescent green recorder. She beat the drum with the recorder with such enthusiasm and in perfect time. Already she is streets ahead of the likes of me in terms of musical ability! Little Blessings, our youngest, sat seriously in the middle of the group with a drum and played steadily and usually in time through every song. Chisomo was the most focused on the words and sang with gusto in both languages. Mona Lisa put in a few words here and there and watched the faces of the Care Givers as they sang. The whole session was well thought out and well executed. I was so proud and not far from tears as I came downstairs to get on with the paper work. Sometimes I have moments of terrible doubt that I have managed to pitch the training at the right level and in a way that is appropriate to Malawi. This little walk down the corridor this morning shows me that we have at least got some of it right!!

Later in the day

I actually finished on time today for the first time since the Children's Centre opened. I realized it will not be helpful to anyone if I tire myself out so much that I am unable to continue to do the job properly. So here I am sitting on the bed in my house with June Tabor playing and an hour or so before the other volunteers get home to have a quiet time and organize my thoughts a bit, and to blog. Since I wrote last weekend David and Kirren and I have put our heads together and divided out the work that has to be done between us. There is still a heavy load, but too my delight Kirren appears to be as little daunted as David by all the practical 'stuff' about which I procrastinate so badly, so I have been able to hand over things like ordering cleaning materials without feeling too guilty about it. I am holding on to the management of the staff team and last week I was challenged by a fairly major falling out of workers in the Toddler Room, and some rather unprofessional behaviour which we really cannot have happening in the Children's Centre. All seems to have been sorted out now and on Monday and Tuesday the room has been getting on with putting together stimulating activities for the children and I have had reports from both sides of the dispute that everything is much better than last week. Kirren has put some time into sorting out the last pair of classrooms which have still not quite been handed over to us by the construction team. We had used them as a bit of a dumping ground for everything that we didn't have an obvious place or immediate use for. Now we still have one room being used for storage but it is much better organized and we have found one or two useful things that had been mislaid, for example the A2 sugar paper that I had planned to use to make scrapbooks for the children's Learning Journeys but had been unable to locate. The other room will be used for Stay and Play and is beginning to look more like a play room and less like a municipal dump.

Unfortunately one of the Room Leaders has had to take a couple of weeks off for health reasons and as we have to work towards having floor supervisors rather than an experienced member of staff in each room from mid-April anyway we are practicing by putting Kirren in there for a couple of hours each morning only and assessing whether this is sufficient support for the Care Givers to ensure that the children's needs are met. So far, so good, but I know it is early days!

I put up a notice today telling the staff that we shall be looking to appoint 8 full time Trainee Room Leader posts from 1 April, and inviting them to apply. Beehive is funding a leadership training course for 25 Care Givers on 4 days during March. By the time I left at 3.30pm 20 people had signed up, so I am sure that we shall have to select the ones that show most promise of being ready for extra responsibility. In order to be fair to all the students who are working so hard to gain their Diplomas in the shortest possible time we shall have to continue to employ them all for 2 days a week, but without a room leader to provide continuity for the children we must have someone on each shift who is there every day. Eeeeee! Balancing the needs of children, families, Care Givers, volunteers, Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all is a pretty tough task!

David, Kirren and Edna are still working hard on the marketing of the fee-paying places. The 'Get March Free' promotion is over, without significant success. We are having a 'Fun Day' on the 10 March, for which Kirren is full of bright, interesting ideas. The next promotion is "Introduce a friend and get a free bike.' I was not 100% sure about this at first but bikes are certainly a valuable commodity here, so we shall see. We didn't have much response to the radio adverts, so we won't be spending money on that again.

Life is not all work, we had a great weekend with ten of us going to Majete. We stayed at Thwale camp and went on two game drives. We were lucky and saw elephants on two occasions. Rita was thrilled to see zebras. I saw Eland and Buffalo for the first time, although the buffalo was a long way away and looked not unlike a grey rock in the distance! The birds were good too. We saw a brown snake eagle, various bee eaters including an olive bee eater which I'd not come across before, kingfishers, various flycatchers, including both male and female paradise fly catchers. It was a beautiful and peaceful camp with six sturdy tents set in a semicircle around a water hole. You could just sit on your khonde and see baboons, impala, and occasional other visitors without even putting down your drink! Francoise and I took a sneaky look at the luxury tent to see what distinguished it from our more basic accommodation. The main difference was a magnificent outdoor bathroom. You could sit enthroned and contemplate the beauty and silence of the bush, shower in the open air, and clean your teeth while watching the antics of the baboons!