Progress of our intermediate child care course

We are moving towards the end of the first of two 9-week terms of the Beehive Intermediate Child Care Diploma course. It has been hard work for the students and also for me and for David. Every lecture, discussion and activity is new material that has to be planned carefully as we are aware of the need to make sure that the input is suitable for Malawi and not just regurgitation of input we may have used for similar situations at home in the UK. We will be much better qualified to do the job by the time we reach the end of it than we were when we arrived nearly six months ago. Sometimes it feels as though we have only just started the task of teaching our students and sometimes I feel as though I have known them for years. I just start to get complacent and then something occurs that shows me I know next to nothing! For example the time when we got the students to look at all the milestones of the Malawian ECD syllabus in the Social and Emotional, and Moral and Spiritual Domains and group them into 'Social', 'Emotional', 'Moral' and 'Spiritual' milestones. It had never occurred to me that anyone would think that gender identity with respect to little children was a moral issue, but to my astonishment when I applied my own criterion that if more than half the class agreed a particular milestone went into a particular group it would have to go there, that is where gender identity went. There were other issues where the class was unable to reach a majority view, but not this one. I was definitely overruled and women felt as strongly about it as men.

For the last four weeks the students have been taking it in turns to start sessions by presenting their story sacks. The whole project has been of rather mixed success. Firstly they seemed to choose what I considered to be rather odd and sometimes dull books. There are far too many reading scheme books among the second hand selections that we receive regularly from donors in the UK. I do not wish to seem ungrateful, but if I may generalize, reading schemes are not the best stories I have ever read! The students seem to like them however, perhaps it is because they are designed for children whose reading is in the early stages and thus the language is simpler and Chichewa speakers find it more easily comprehensible. Some of these 'easy readers' use traditional English stories such as 'The Three Billy Goats Gruff' and 'The Little Red Hen'. These I found better. The students have really excelled at making the bags to hold the items to help the children to understand and enjoy the story. I bought some cheap, bright, traditional, African printed cotton and also collected some second hand material and tailor's scraps. Some of the bags are beautiful with homemade strings and fringing made out of odds and ends of wool that I begged from the knitting project. They took seriously my suggestion that children should be able immediately to identify which bag was for which story by what was on the outside of the bag and we have had some interesting appliqués. The local material met with a mixed reception. One girl was absolutely horrified that we were going to cut up decent chitenje lengths and use them for toys for children. She gave me quite a hard time about it. She felt it was definitely not right when there were many people who needed such things to wear. I asked her if the children did not deserve also to have good quality materials from which to learn, but she did not seem very impressed with that as an argument! I put together a presentation about making story sacks and had a go at making one myself as a demonstration model, but in retrospect I do not think I made enough or gave it as much thought as I should have. I talked about collecting relevant household items and I provided a lot of soft toys to be used as characters from the stories. I also drew a few things and characters that I could not find suitable items to represent and then laminated them to make them more durable. I think the technology involved appealed to the students because almost all used laminated characters and props. Many simply reproduced the pictures in the book, rather than providing additional items for the children to use imaginatively to play with and to develop the ideas in the story. I tried to explain about the play value of having a little character that you could use to reenact the story, rather than having pictures where the character is only seen doing one thing, but I am not at all sure that everyone understood. Some of the presentations were a bit labored, instead of simply telling the story and illustrating it with the props they had collected together many groups spent ages telling us what the story was going to be about and then told the story, simply holding up the items, but not really using them in an imaginative way. I often think they would be much better presenting this kind of work in Chichewa, and indeed sometimes we do encourage them to tell stories in Chichewa, but the disadvantage is that we do not understand more than the odd word. Even those with very good English tend to sound a bit stilted in English, but in Chichewa, they are more animated and the words are more fluid and expressive. I am sure that this is the way to go. Malawian children are more or less brought up to be bilingual. All secondary and a good proportion of primary education is in English, but with little ones there is great value in telling stories and rhymes in the first language so I don't think that we should encourage the children to speak English all the time but make use of the fact that all the staff are bilingual. In the baby room most of the communication should be in Chichewa and the amount of English gradually increased as the children move up through the age groups.

We have had a week looking at working with Babies, a week on Toddlers and next week we shall be looking at children aged 3-6 years. We are trying to familiarize our students (and ourselves) with the Malawian ECD (Early Childhood Development) Curriculum. You would think this would be easy, order 70 copies, hand them out and encourage them to read it; job done! Ha! In Malawi nothing is so simple. I began by approaching the local Social Services department, part of whose brief is to inspect early years provision, presumably ensuring that they are teaching the right things. It took three visits and several phone calls before eventually I received one copy. I have been to Lilongwe (four hours drive away) and visited both the Ministry of Gender and Unicef, who worked together to produce the document, but it is out of print and unobtainable. Eventually I decided that it would be quicker to retype the whole thing, so David and I have done this between us. It was a good way of getting to grips with the content but was rather laborious. David was a star, and did the two largest Domains, Physical Development and Mental and Cognitive Development. Every time I saw him for about two weeks he seemed to be madly typing and alternately tearing out his hair in frustration and laughing hysterically at the explanation column which attempts to tell the care giver the reasons behind the choice of the milestones but does not always quite make it. The phrase 'this is a wonderful way to…' appears many times. If I ever write a book about Early Years Education in Malawi I think I shall have to call it 'The Wonderful Way'! Even though I had the two smaller domains, Social and Emotional, and Moral and Spiritual, I finished my typing considerably after David did, largely because I tried to supplement it with extra ideas of activities and far more extensive resources lists than appear in the original. I did my usual trick of using a different colour type for the Pearson additions, so that the original document is the black type and my embellishments are purple. I still need to do the Social and Emotional purple bits and eventually also the other two Domains as well, but it is a bit of a long term project and perhaps my dissertation should take priority!

We have also had a week on nutrition, and a week on hygiene, sanitation, water and infection control. I brought in Chaliza to help with nutrition Malawi-style and one of our students who has worked as a Health Education Field Worker to talk about food hygiene and hand-washing. People are cooking and eating in such different ways here from the ways we do in the UK that it would have been difficult for me and David to present these subjects with any credibility. I have certainly learned a lot about Malawian fruits and vegetables and a whole new way of classifying food into six groups that works really well to help people make a properly balanced diet out of locally available foods. The groups are: Staple Foods, Animal Foods, Fruits, Vegetables, Legumes and Nuts, and Fats and Oils. It works well. As a little aside, some of you may be interested to know the effect that a transfer to a more or less Malawian diet had had on me. I have not been restricting my food intake at all, but in the six-months I have been here have lost 3 stone. I suppose my lifestyle is a bit more active here than it was at home, but not hugely so. I am not exactly sylph-like yet, but am nearer to it than I was!

At home discussion of infection control focuses on other diseases, our Health Worker concentrated upon cholera, typhoid and dysentery. I have learned the two-cup technique for drinking water, which involves using one cup to dip into the water bucket and pour into a second cup to drink from, to avoid redipping a cup that has been used for drinking and thus contaminating the water store. We have also practiced a thorough handwashing technique that uses very little water and avoids sharing the water and thus acquiring infection from previous washers, all very clever, and not things we need to think about in England with piped water in every home and plenty of rainfall all year round.

And so we are approaching the Easter holiday. Almost half way through the theoretical part of the course already! Time seems to have gone so fast since we began the course. The Children's Centre is continuing to grow. We watch it getting bigger from our vantage point on the steps of the classroom which is further up the hill. The building schedule has slipped in true Malawian style and it will definitely not be finished in July as per the original plan, but if we are lucky the south, day care building will be done by September in time for the start of the next academic year. George is working hard to recruit room leaders to work in the Children's Centre and manage teams of our students working as care givers and gaining practical experience to complete their Diploma training. Anyone who fancies six months in Malawi with a bunch of enthusiastic but inexperienced staff launching the Beehive Children's Centre in to the community in Chilomoni should talk to George. I can't promise it will be easy, but it will certainly be interesting and a challenge. Also I can promise fun, at least some of the time, and the weather is good! Just fancy, by the time I come home I shall have missed two British winters!

A trip to Zomba and an explanation

Last Sunday we decided to go and have a look at Chingwe's Hole, an apparently bottomless pit, which is actually about 60 metres deep, up in the mountains of Zomba Plateau. As the roads are notoriously bad on the plateau we decided to take the Land Rover despite the fact that travelers in the back were likely to be well shaken up by the time we arrived. Malcolm had been studying the map, not a great map as it turned out, but then I have yet to find a good detailed map of Malawi! We reckon that the best thing to do is to install a computer in the Land Rover and use Google Earth, but as yet we have not developed the technology! Malcolm identified a road on the map, which claimed to be a main road, which would provide an alternative route to Zomba that was not a great deal further than the usual way. The obvious road is narrow and bumpy, but is at least tarmacked, and it takes about an hour and twenty minutes to get to Zomba. David, who has been on such trips before, arrived at the Land Rover with the cushions from the easy chairs in his house and settled himself on top of the spare wheel with cushions underneath and behind him. Malcolm drove, Philip and Sharon perched on the bench seats in the back and I had first shift in the comfort of the front seat! On the way we passed an extraordinary, football shaped house on the main road out of Blantyre towards Lilongwe. Philip explained that when he was in Malawi twenty years ago he had known the guy who owns this house and that he had tried to contact him recently but been unable to.

The first challenge was to identify the turn off for the back way to Zomba. The map showed a turn to the right in a village called xxxx. We found xxxx alright and there were two potential candidates for the right road. There was a police barrier close to one of them and after a brief debate on the wisdom of initiating contact with the police in case they found something wrong with the Land Rover and fined us, we asked the way and were directed down a narrow dirt track that would have been more like the approach to a run-down hill farm in England than anything else! The trip was reminiscent of the drive down the right hand turn from the bottom of the drive that ended up at the airport, in that the road got narrower and less smooth as we went along. On the map it was a firm brown line with only two turns marked, but there were several turns to left and right and at some unknown point we must have taken the wrong one. The drive was beautiful and fascinating. The mountains grew gradually nearer so we knew we were not going in completely the wrong direction, but something was not right, we knew from the map that we should be approaching Chingale, but although we passed many collections of houses we did not encounter anywhere that was large enough to merit a mention on our map. It was surprising how the condition of the maize growing in fields quite close to one another varied, it looked as though some had had enough water and other patches, not enough at all. Harvest time is only a couple of weeks away. There has not been a great deal of rain in recent weeks, some steady drizzle occasionally, but no real downpours. Apparently this is unusual and the crops are missing the water. We saw many plots of cotton in flower, some tobacco, endless maize interspersed with vegetables, pumpkins which are grown for their leaves as well as the fruits. There were bridges and culverts over rivers and streams, but some of the beds were dry. The mountains were beautiful, misty blue in the distance and vivid and lush green as we approached, the higher we got, the more water and the better looking the crops. Eventually we asked a series of people where we were and at last found someone who was able to tell us not only that we were on the Liwonde road, which was not at all the direction in which we wanted to go, but also that we needed to retrace our steps a couple of kilometres and turn left for Chingale. So now we were on a road that did not appear anywhere on the map and in places the maize touched both sides of the Land Rover. David complained to Malcolm that he had been promised views and all he could see was foliage! A couple of hours after turning off we finally arrived at a trading centre with signs that indicated we were in Chingale. Hoorah! -Two thirds of the way along the brown line on the map. It was not long before we lost the way again and soon Sharon was exercising her rusty Chichewa of twenty years ago to try to get us on the Zomba road. Eventually we found it, more by luck than judgment I fear, and climbed, higher and higher. We stopped at one point to look at the view. It was a bright sunny day, with just a little haze softening the focus of the view, but we could see for miles, a vast panorama of flat plain with the silver ribbon of the Shire river rippling across the middle and Lake Malombe clearly visible just below the blend of blue and grey where distant mountains met the sky the other side of the plain. When we got properly into the mountains there were uncultivated areas with wild flowers in abundance and I saw several butterflies in various sizes and colours, and many birds including the vermillion and flame flashes of Yellow and Red Bishops. Also a black bird with a long trailing tail that Sharon thought was a bee-eater, but I can't find it in the book. Some kind of widow perhaps? It was in silhouette and I couldn't tell if it was all black or not. The Zomba end of the brown line on the map is probably the most beautiful road along which I have driven since I arrived in Malawi. By this time I was in the back of the Land Rover and could look out of the back window over the way we had come. Our first stop in Zomba was the supermarket for cold drinks and then we turned the Land Rover's bonnet so it was pointing upwards again and started up to the plateau. We turned to the left at the track which forms a wriggly ring road round the plateau.

 

I wrote the beginning of this entry about a month ago, and because it was not finished I did not publish it. Why have I not written for a month following being such a regular blogger? I am not sure. I think there is not a single important reason, but more a series of small reasons that have added up to inaction. I have certainly been very busy. I think George's original estimate that the development of the course would need three trainers was probably pretty accurate. David and I are doing a pretty good job but we are preparing new material for every session and actually teaching for 26 hours a week, so this adds up to a lot of time spent over a hot computer putting new Power Point presentations together. Certainly my knowledge of the technology has improved no end in the five months I have been here! Spending my evenings at the computer as well has become a less attractive option of late. This is partly because there are more folk at Mitsidi and consequently social life is more varied and I have spent more time just being at Mitsidi in the company of others. We play quite a bit of Scrabble and the standard suits me! I am able to win some of the time, but there are others who can beat me frequently, so there is enough challenge to keep me interested. Karl and I used to play a lot of Scrabble while he was in hospital and I think I only beat him on three occasions, certainly not often enough to prevent me from becoming discouraged! We all go to the Liquor Garden now and then and this is good because it means socializing with Malawians, although respectable Malawian women are not seen there. I seem to get away with it as an azungu. We have been out for a few meals including a memorable evening at an Ethiopian café where we ate a selection of dishes with Ethiopian, rolled flatbread, which was different and interesting. The couple who ran the place made a selection of dishes for us to try and really went out of their way to make us welcome. Next week it is my birthday and I get to choose where we go. I can't make up my mind. We have finally managed to sort out how to use the big screen in the living room at Mitsidi in conjunction with a laptop to show films and for the last two Fridays have had sociable cinema evenings. Most weekends we go somewhere on at least one of the days, although I find that if I am to get through the week's work without too much panic I have to spend at least part of the other day in preparation for teaching. Last weekend I went to the Mount Soche with Vince and his children, Amanda, who is a nurse working with VSO in Ntcheu, and a couple of medical friends of hers who work in Blantyre at Queen's Hospital. It was good to meet Amanda, with whom I have exchanged the odd email. I liked her very much and it was good to have a like-minded woman of about my own age to talk to. I hope to visit her in Ntcheu on my way to Lilongwe to collect Rose and Joe in a couple of week's time. I am getting very excited about their visit. Already it seems a long time since Jack was here and it will be lovely to have my children with me. When they return home it will only be about six weeks to my own trip to UK on 25 May. So much to do before then! I have hardly touched my dissertation since Christmas and Plan A is to have a draft done to discuss with my supervisor by then….

 

 

 

Perhaps I should briefly finish the tale of the trip to Chingwe's Hole. It seems a long time ago now! We did find it, and it was impressive. What at first appears to be a small clump of trees adjacent to the most amazing misty blue view of the Shire valley, turns out to be a deep hole maybe three metres across, with trees and vegetation clinging to the almost vertical sides and deep darkness in the middle with no prospect of seeing the bottom. The guides at the top told us that it is about 60 metres deep and that there must be some way out although they were not clear about exactly what. Apparently lepers used to be thrown down there. I understand that Chingwe means something like rope and that it got its name because no one wanted to touch the lepers to throw them down so they used to twist ropes around them and throw them in touching the ropes only. Apparently there is a place near the bottom called 'Dead body village' where bodies and bits of bodies used to turn up with great regularity. Most unpleasant!

While we were inspecting the hole we saw that there was a couple sitting on a bench quietly enjoying the magnificent view; a white man of maybe 60 and a younger Malawian woman. The guide took us down a steep twisty path a few hundred metres to see what he described as 'the gorge', a spectacular rock formation which you could easily miss if you did not know it was there. I realized that the couple from the bench had joined our party and were talking animatedly to Phillip. It turned out that this was the man that he had been talking about earlier who owned the 'football' house. Talk about a coincidence!

Where else have I been since I last wrote up the blog? I have been up the 'Way of the Rosary' again one Sunday afternoon. I think this is definitely the most beautiful local walk, and another weekend I went with Malcolm to Michuri Nature Reserve again, but we didn't see much in the way of wild-life. We have had shopping trips to Blantyre. I have continued to develop a relationship with Joseph, a street vendor who sells souvenirs and craft items to azungus. He now knows that if I say I am not buying today I really mean it, and leaves me alone. When I do want to buy I fondly imagine that he charges me a reasonable price! A couple of weeks ago I treated myself to a lovely malachite necklace. Now what I need (?) is earrings to match! We spend an hour or so most Saturdays in the garden of the Mount Soche hotel over mzuzu coffee and cake. Last weekend Malcolm, Melvin (the new engineer) and I went to Mulange and climbed up to the waterfall again, the same walk that I did with Jack and Mary a couple of months ago. We set off in the Land Rover to find the Fort Lister Pass but unfortunately did not find it until about 4.00pm which was too late to ensure getting down again before dark, so that remains a trip for a future occasion. Maybe later this weekend I shall get around to bringing you up to date on the development of the course, maybe you will have to wait longer! This afternoon we are off to the Kamuzu stadium to watch Malawi play Togo. International football at K200 a ticket! (less than a pound!).

I'll try not to take a whole month 'til my next entry! If you want to encourage me, comment!