Transitions

It is Saturday morning 3 September, a day that has been a bright star in my metaphorical calendar for a couple of months now, ever since Annie and Linda booked their flight. As I type they must be in Johannesburg airport waiting for a connecting flight to Blantyre. Annie is staying for a month and Lin for 2 weeks. For the second week we are off on holiday again. Schedule not yet planned and heavily dependent on how much diesel we can get hold off. The three of us will be joined by Amanda. I think it will work out very well. Annie is going to run a short course for the students in the third week using her mediation skills.

This week has been a bit bitty in terms of work; busy, busy all the time with lots of different jobs! We have done a lot of sorting and moving 'stuff' for the Children's Centre. Sue and Sarah have done Trojan work collecting all the toys and equipment that has been brought in by container from the UK, catalogued it all and stacked it neatly in a container which has only CC stuff. This is the sort of job I hate and am really bad at! My spare bedroom needed to be cleared for Lin, so all the training materials which have been stored there since we cleared the classroom a few weeks ago have been sorted and moved, and we have almost dealt with the contents of the Lake Malawi room at Mitsidi also. This has been a glorified cupboard for storing anything vaguely connected with the CC that we weren't sure what to do with, since before I arrived 11 months ago!

I have finished the first draft of annotating my share of the Malawian ECD curriculum and David is well on the way with his share too. Next step is for us each to read and comment upon the other's work, then adapt as necessary and print out a copy for each room in the CC. I am making steady progress too with the first run through of the practical assessment tasks for the third part of the student's Diploma. I have done about two thirds now. Of course there is still a lot of work to be done. Really we should prepare model answers and a proper marking scheme. I guess that now the CC opening is delayed until January we may actually have time to do this! The other major task for this week has been the preparation of a presentation to bring Vince up to speed on the developments re the CC while he has been in the UK for the past couple of months. This is Sue and Brian's baby really. My part has been to explain the plans for a second cohort of students, possibly starting next March. It would be great if this becomes a reality. If the vision for the CC as an example of excellent practice, showing the effect of a multi-agency approach on outcomes for the children of Chilomoni, is to be sustainable we shall have to make plans for training future staff members to the same standard as the first group.

This week has also seen the students receiving letters telling them the arrangements for when the Centre opens. All students have been given an opportunity to finish the course. For most it is a three-month paid work placement, but there is a group of 15 whose situation will be monitored closely and reviewed after 4 weeks. We have distributed the programme of short courses. Responses to this are varied but mostly positive. David, Sarah and I have put our heads together over the first one which is called 'Looking back and looking forward' and is mostly about giving the students a forum to air their views about the delay to the opening. We need to know what the important issues are for people so we can keep on top of potential problems. There will be lots of preparation needed for these courses so David and I will be kept pretty busy through the next three months despite the change of plan.

Sue and Brian are off back to the UK on Wednesday. They have worked extremely hard while they have been here and from the point of view of running the CC as a business they have put some good structures in place. I think Sarah has a tough job to do to follow this up, but she too appears to know what she is doing. I think we are experiencing some of the difficulties that come from using short term volunteers in positions of leadership. My gut feeling is that the CC needs continuity in terms of management and however good the skills of individual volunteers may be, bringing people out for 2 or 3 months is not really ideal, especially in management positions. However no one yet has come forward prepared to do the job for a year or so, so of course we must make do with what we have.