It is a fortnight since my last entry. The long gap is largely because I have been having further trouble with my laptop, getting repeated messages that a problem with the hard disk has been detected and to immediately back up everything. Yohane has been a star, but yet again he has had to back everything up, wipe the disk clean and start again. I am sick of having to hang about and I am sure he has better things to do. Unfortunately the period between him returning it to me and the next message was approximately 20 minutes, so I fear the damage may be terminal. I have now taken the precaution of copying the latest back up onto the office desktop. I must be disciplined about keeping it up to date! On top of this lie the usual Malawi troubles of intermittent internet services and slow download speeds.

During the last two weeks we have run two short courses, 'Outdoor Play' and 'Creative activities for babies, toddlers and young children'. David, Sarah and I have enjoyed seeing the students a bit more frequently. We have courses on three consecutive weeks during October. Sarah has welcomed the chance to contribute to the courses and thus begin to get to know the students, who will be her Care Givers in the Children's Centre. We divided the six hours available for the outdoor play course into three hours for babies and toddlers, led by Sarah and me, and three for 3-6s, led by David and Marc. We began our session by revising the types and stages of play, and the domains of the Malawian ECD curriculum. Sarah's lecturing debut comprised a short session looking at assessment of risk and we introduced the students to the 'Mother Teresa Children's Centre Activity Risk Assessment Form'. Then it was out into the bottom level of the Beehive Site for some practical play training. Oh the joys of teaching in a building site! We had taken a lot of trouble to discuss with Hugh (the engineer who coordinates the work of the building site) where the best location would be to do our outdoor play training. Of course in England no one would let a bunch of crazy early years' people anywhere near a building site, but this is Malawi! It certainly gave us plenty of opportunities for a practical look at risk assessment! There are only two open spaces on the site large enough to accommodate a couple of tutors and twenty or so students. Right down the bottom of the site on level 5, which when we looked at it with Hugh was a level, dusty plot of land containing virtually nothing, further up the hill on level 3 is a paved area in front of the admin building which accommodated all sorts of workmen involved in making and assembling vital parts of the construction and a couple of containers due to be removed to level 5; also this area is a busy route between admin and the rest of the site. We decided that although it was further from the classroom and messy from the point of view of dusty soil, level 5 would be much the more suitable area, and Hugh kindly helped us to collect together all sorts of potentially useful materials to encourage challenging learning opportunities out of doors. We piled up off cuts of wood including lengths of old scaffolding poles, tyres, hydroform blocks, planks, bricks, buckets, plastic trays and pipes, wood shavings… indeed anything we could glean, beg, borrow or steal from others on the site. Then Sarah and I made a raid on the container in which we keep materials donated for the Children's Centre and selected toys, paper, paints, writing materials, paddling pool, baskets, table cloths etc. A quick dash to the fabric shop to buy a few zitenje and we were well-equipped. On the day we divided the students into five groups and gave each group a task specifying the age of the children we wished them to provide outdoor play experiences for and the type of play we were looking for. We had baby play, heuristic play, an obstacle course, hide and seek play and a creativity day for toddlers. Sarah said she was pleasantly surprised by the activities the students put together considering that most of them, despite their theoretical knowledge, have never actually worked with children. I was proud of their efforts. Nothing stands still for long though, and between our discussion with Hugh and the day of the training, about 5 days, four or five containers had been moved to level 5 and the previously deserted area had become a route for trucks and dumpers moving equipment between containers, so we were contending with dust and traffic, not a great combination! On the Wednesday between the two training days we had unexpected heavy rain, so on the Thurday at least the dust was laid, but then we had mud…

We are in the midst of rather uexpected weather conditions. When I arrived in Malawi, this time last year, it was HOT! A few weeks ago while Annie was here the weather got steadily warmer and I thought we had seen the last of rain at least until November. We even had the fan on at night for a few days, but now it is back to needing not only a sheet, but a light quilt at night, and astonishingly according to the locals, we have had at least three periods of heavy rain. The locals assume me this is most uncharacteristic. This has caused Hugh and his team all sorts of headaches on the site and he has been kept awake at nights worrying about holes filling up with water! The landscape is still pretty brown, but the tones have deepened. Wet soil is darker and redder than dry. The new leaves are coming through now on many trees and I do not think it is my imagination that in the last few days they have visibly swelled and become more intensely green after the rain. To a European the seasons here are confusing. The last set of leaves has fallen during the last couple of months. Some of the big trees in the garden were bare of leaves for maybe a couple of weeks and then the first green blush of new leaves emerged. We had about a month of clear visibility of the birds, but now their cover is back, fresher and lusher, and getting better and better each day. A pair of hammerkops has built a huge, scruffy, straggly nest halfway up a tree at the end of Jacaranda Terrace. I can sit on my khonde and watch them as they fly assiduously back and forward all day collecting materials and weaving them into the nest. Last week I became very concerned as I saw nothing of them for two whole days and I feared that they had abandoned the nest, but they are back and working hard once again. I wonder where they went? Because the tree is rooted at the bottom of the bank by the stream which marks the boundary of Mitsidi, and because Jacaranda Terrace is at the top of the high bank the nest is not so very much higher than the houses and it is possible to look across directly into the nest and see the hammerkops at work. I am hoping I shall soon be able to see eggs and chicks. On the site the landscape gardeners have been at work and around the IT college there are flower beds and even a small lawn. At the same time Father John, as the new college Principal, has been smartening up the college with hangings made of the bright green chitenje material that was commissioned for the college opening and many potted plants in hanging baskets and planters. All these plants have loved the rain, and the weather has saved the gardeners from hours of watering! The lawn in front of the building is finer grass than is usually used here in Malawi and it was really struggling to become established, but now it has taken well and its feathery fronds are almost completely covering the plot.

To get back to teaching, the second course since I last wrote was about creative play opportunities for babies, toddlers and young children and we ran three parallel workshops, Sarah looking at babies, me at toddlers and David at 3-6 year olds. This approach had advantages and disadvantages as by the end of two days we had each run our own workshop six times and were beginning to lose the will to live! Sarah brought in her hotplate from Mitsidi and supervised the making of cooked playdough and Gloop! I put together a brief revision presentation combining what I thought they ought to know about Toddlers with what I thought they ought to know about creative play and then sent them off to play with seven different activities and answer a couple of lists of questions about safety and risk assessment, and play value and learning targets. It was fascinating to see the different ways in which each group of seven or eight students approached the task. Some groups all stuck together and discussed each question earnestly. Others split up into small groups and just played! I let them get on with it, and when it came to the feedback at the end there was not a noticeable difference in the general quality of the answers to my questions between the two approaches. Some groups easily identified which was the activity that was not really suitable for toddlers in the form in which it was presented, and some found it more difficult and I had to scaffold their thinking and help them work it out! We had some interesting discussions about the ethics of playing with food in the culture in which we are working, but for most people the reassurance that children were playing with substances that were completely safe if they put them in their mouths was more important than the idea of wasting foodstuffs. I was quite surprised about this as we have several students at the moment who are really struggling to find the money to buy food enough for themselves and their families. A friend sent me twenty pounds this week to spend as I saw fit amongst the students for whom the delay to the opening of the Children's Centre has caused real financial hardship, and I have paid a few minibus fares for students to get to training and bought some basic foodstuffs. It is impossible to be at all fair about this process, and after all twenty pounds does not go very far, but I suppose I must just hope that these small contributions go a short way towards making the waiting easier for those in the most difficult situations. Of course some students are more vocal than others, and some more truthful than others. There is no way of telling, and we must rely on instinct and the little information we have. I am sure I shall make mistakes, but if I do not try the money will lie in the drawer and be no use at all! David concentrated on the older end of his age range of 3-6 years and had the class making horses out of aluminium foil and building bridges out of newspaper and selotape. That is, he was much more focused on product than were Sarah and I. With little ones, process is everything!

This weekend it is Mother's Day here in Malawi so we have an extra day off on Monday. Next week we are going to work with the students to improve their planning skills, particularly considering the use of themes or topics to improve the quality of learning. This is not a fashionable approach in UK at the moment, but we feel that in the early stages it will help the students to provide a broad spectrum of high quality play activities while they are gaining experience with working with children, and while all the staff and children are new together. It is bound to take a while for everyone to get used to each other and settle down into good teaching and learning patterns. Again I shall look at this course as an opportunity for revision, consolidating previous work we have done on planning provision based on observations of children.

Socially, what have I been up to since Annie left? I have continued to attend choir practices whenever I can. Because of the dvd project with Father John Dimba we have stepped up our practice routine and now meet for half an hour at lunchtime on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. The first four songs have been selected and we are working on the next four. I am acting as go-between between the choir and Father John, as he is my next door neighbour. Next Wednesday he will be coming to practice to teach us one of the songs he wants to suggest for the dvd. I am really struggling with the songs in Chichewa, which is most of them. It is fine when I can read the words, but memorizing them is really difficult. One or two of the ladies have sort of adopted me and treat me a bit like a child with a learning delay, standing next to me and pointing at each word throughout the whole song. This is kind, but not entirely necessary; it is when I don't have the words that I am in trouble. This is all further complicated by the fact that one keen helper is a very strong soprano and I am a weak alto. I feel like a fraud being in the choir at all, but is fun, and I have been made welcome.

Since we returned from the Lake of Stars trip we seem to have been passing a bacterial stomach upset between us. We know it is bacterial because poor Lindsey, who arrived only a couple of weeks ago managed to get dehydrated and was briefly hospitalized while they sorted out what the problem was…This has meant that we have been feeling a bit rough for mush serious socialization! Also because the volunteer's car is out of action following the Lake trip and also the fuel shortage continues we are less mobile than usual. We have been steadily getting to know new volunteers. Linda and Hugh have made lots of contacts with other expats and this week, rather to our surprise, Chris and I found ourselves members of a quiz team at the meeting of the Wild Life Society of Malawi. There were 17 teams and we were 11^th! Since there were 10 prizes this was particularly galling, but at least we didn't completely disgrace ourselves even though we didn't exactly shine either!

This weekend was to have been a bit lively with invitations to a meal at Vishal's (one of our suppliers) this evening, a barbeque at Zoe's new flat tomorrow, and Mother's Day lunch at Mary's on Monday. Unfortunately the Malawian casual approach to planning means that Vishal has cancelled because he has gone to Lilongwe and Mary has changed the date of her party to Sunday so that it clashes with Zoe's with which I have promised to help, so my wild social whirl is reduced from three events to one! Boo Hoo!