100th entry

Wow!

I've actually reached one hundred entries on this blog! I don't think I ever thought I would write so much when I started it.

Today has been a long and exhausting day. It began when the alarm went off at about ten past five and I shrank down under the sheet and closed my eyes again! I have never been at my best in the mornings and the days start so early here. The CC opens at 6.30am and since I am completely incapable of functioning without a morning shower and a decent breakfast I have to get up at least an hour before I am due at work. Today it was a rush as 'just closing my eyes for five minutes' became twenty five, after which I woke with a start, staggered out of bed and started the day. I managed to make eggy bread and still be in the Land Rover by ten past six! Kirren came with me with peanut butter sandwich in hand. We distributed keys for the Care Givers to unlock their own rooms and I pottered along the corridor going in and out of rooms and seeing what was planned for the day. I like walking along the balcony and pausing to watch what is happening in each room, but this morning I was a bit too early and there were no children yet. Care Givers were sweeping and setting out activities, greeting each other and planning the day. Then it was downstairs for an informal meeting with Kirren, comparing notes about what needed to be done. I typed a notice explaining that David was off sick and rearranging his appointments, and another about the opportunity to apply for two trainee Children's Centre Manager jobs, found a few bits of paper that had gone missing yesterday, had a chat with a student who needed to go to a clinic as she had been diagnosed as having Malaria, and as she is pregnant she needs to get treatment urgently and wanted time off to go to a second clinic as the first did not have the necessary drugs. I accepted a piece of work for assessment from another student. As I had to be in Blantyre by 8.00am for a dental appointment I took the lady with malaria to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital which has a specialist malaria clinic, and then back across town to the dentist at the Seventh Day Adventist private hospital. This trip should have taken about 8 minutes but I got involved with a queue for petrol and couldn't get out of it so it took me about 28! Following the treatment and still numb from the anesthetic it was back across town to drop off something to a colleague who had left it behind. I was about to pick up from the Malaria clinic when I got a call saying the patient had been sent home for bed rest, so I turned round again and set off back to Chilomoni. A quick whizz round the CC to check everything was fine and then it was off to the Senior Management Meeting, and it was still before 10.00am! Then it was back to the Children's Centre and a steady stream of appointments to assess students on their practical tasks for their Diploma. When we planned this David and I worked out we would need to do six practical assessments per day each in order to get all 66 students through the Diploma in five months. We thought this would be tough enough as each takes about an hour to watch the activity, mark the background questions and then give the student some feedback on how it went. Today I did four or five and then a supervision meeting before picking up a pile of draft tasks to check for my mentees over a nice cup of tea on the khonde of my house after walking home to Mitsidi. Just as I put my pen down after an hour of marking, and a bowl of popcorn, Hugh came round to say that there was a crisis in the CC. A child had not been picked up, it was 15 minutes after closing time, the parent was unobtainable and the man on the end of the emergency contact number had never heard of the family! I had managed to leave my phone in the CC and the Room Leaders had been trying to contact me. It was back in the Land Rover and off to the rescue! I managed to find by digging out the child's registration form that the emergency contact no had been wrongly transcribed on to the child's contact card, so we rang the original number only to find that the person the other end was in Lilongwe and also had never heard of the family! In Malawi, addresses are much less specific that we are used to in the UK, probably because there are no postal deliveries. All post goes to Private Bags or PO Boxes. The child's address on the form was 'Behind the Chief's house close to St James' church'. We rang David who was the most likely member of staff to have done a home visit and, hallelujah, he knew roughly where it was. By this time it was pitch dark, so two Room Leaders, a Care Giver, the child and I all piled into the Land Rover, left a message with the guard in case someone arrived for the child, and drove to the church, where we met David. He set off down a narrow dirt road and I drove cautiously after him. The little boy who was about two and a half was thoroughly enjoying himself. He sat on the Care Giver's lap in the car, full of excitement at getting a ride in a galimoto! We came to a stop and David pointed at a gap between two houses and said 'I think it's about 50 yards down there', so David, the Care Giver and the little lad set off into the blackness and the rest of us waited in the car. Apparently the child knew exactly where he was going despite the darkness and they arrived at the house to find that his mother had set off to the CC to fetch him! Poor woman, she had arranged for his big sister to collect him but she had forgotten and gone off to play somewhere, only returning home when it got dark! David left the child with the next door neighbour and then it remained only to give the Care Giver a lift home and the Room Leaders and I could go back to Mitsidi for our, now cold, tea! We got in at 7.30pm. Our plan had been to go to the Wild Life Society talk on the birds of Malawi, but as it started at 7.00 pm and was several miles away we accepted our fate and settled down to enjoy Charles dhal and rice, which was most welcome. Only in Malawi……