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!