Thoughts

I woke early this morning, soon after half-past four, and lay, drifting in and out of sleep, and listening to the sounds of a Malawian morning. Birdsong from the bushes behind my house, a child crying, the breeze moving the leaves of the blue gum trees in their characteristic billowing waves, and the patter of dry leaves falling on to my tin roof. The steady intermittent call of the 'squeaky-wheelbarrow-bird' reminded me that still I do not know its proper name! I could hear the low voices of men as they walked down our lane, greeting each other and chatting together, perhaps as they set out to walk to work, even at this very early hour on a Saturday. The footsteps of one of the Mitsidi guards passed my bedroom window. A dog barked.

Around five, I realized that I was not going to sleep any longer and sat up to read my book for an hour. I made breakfast and took it back to bed, reading on almost until the end of the book. About seven o'clock I heard sounds of those volunteers who are working today leaving for the Beehive building site, and got up and wandered down to the main house in search of coffee. Three hours had passed and still not yet eight o'clock! It struck me how different my life is here from the way it is at home in so many ways. For the last hour I have been sitting on my khonde drinking my way through a pot of coffee, finishing the book and observing the activity of Saturday morning at Mitsidi. Mike, the gardener has been busy caring for the swimming pool; Charles the House Manager, is putting new fly screens on Sarah's house, the previous ones having been slashed by whoever broke in a few days ago. It is a bright day with a clear blue sky and already it is hot. Mercifully the early morning breeze is still blowing and my khonde is still in shade so I am cool here. The movement of the trees provides a soft, comforting, background sound. The African pied wagtails have been busily catching flies. They are used to me now, and peck in the cracks between the paving stones on the path, only three or four feet from my toes! I have seen the scarlet flash of the flight feathers of turacos several times as they glide from tree to tree at the river side of the garden. There has been no movement from the hammerkops' nest. I have seen them only occasionally in the last couple of weeks. I hope this means they are safely inside their shaggy, dome of a home, sitting on eggs.

The story I have been reading, although set in the glasshouses of rural France at the turn of the nineteenth century, was really about families and relationships and as I reached the end where all the loves, tensions, difficulties and separations were sorted out, or not, it made me cry as it reminded me of my own relationships with family and friends who are so far away. Despite the fact that I have been here now for well over a year, and have of course gradually got to know a lot of people, I am missing you all a lot at the moment. I think it was having my sister, Annie, here for a month, actually living in the house with me that highlighted just how much I miss the quality of relationship and depth of understanding that you get from folk who you have known all your life, or even simply known well for a number of years. There are fine people here, both locals and volunteers living at Mitsidi, but building relationships takes time and commitment….. I am so looking forward to coming home for Christmas. I am sure that two weeks will pass in a flash!

OK, enough of the introspection! What have I been doing for the last two weeks? I am constantly astonished by how quickly the weeks pass. There is so much to do to prepare for the opening of the Children's Centre in January. About three o'clock on Friday afternoon I finished printing out the final (?) version of the practical assessment tasks I have written for the third and final part of our child care diploma course. I have said before that they are NVQ-style, but this is not really true, at least not in all aspects, no cross referencing of standards for one! When Sue was here she gave me some assessment tasks she has written to give me some ideas, but I only read a couple, they seemed very English and not appropriate somehow. I toyed for a while with the idea of basing them on the four domains of the Malawian ECD Curriculum, but that didn't work either; then one day David said, 'We've already put a lot of energy into designing the taught part of the course, why don't you just write one task for each subject we covered?' and 'Bingo!' everything fell into place. I did add one or two extra subject areas, 'Moral and Spiritual milestones' for example. I have written 25 tasks. They fall into two groups. Eight are compulsory tasks, covering essential areas such as Child Protection, Risk Assessment and Reflective Practice. Then there are seventeen other tasks, of which each student must complete twelve. Most of them have a similar format, two written questions designed to draw out the key theory behind the subject area, followed by an activity to design to use with the children. A list of possible questions that the assessor may ask to check the student's knowledge, follow each task. There are a few variations in form. Risk Assessment requires the student to fill in risk assessment forms. Reflective practice requires the student to bring their reflective diary to the assessment. Record keeping requires the student to bring a child's 'Learning Journey'. There are times when I am confident that the scheme is going to work well, and times when I am afraid that unforeseen difficulties will arise. At the moment I am keeping my fingers crossed. A dozen or so students are working with children, either supporting Marc in his work with Standard 1 in St James' Primary School, or with the 'Stay and Play' group that Lyndsey has started this week as the beginning of outreach work for the Children's Centre. David and I have decided to pilot a few of the practical assessments on these students in order to identify and iron out any problems before we start on all 68 of them in January. I have made a Practical Manual containing all the questions and also an Answer Book for each student containing pages and planning forms for all the questions and activities within each task. It has been quite a marathon project. If the Children's Centre had opened on time in September there is no way I could have been so thorough.

The opening of the 'Stay and Play' group in St James' Church Hall has been a delight. It is so nice finally to be working with real children. We have had a few problems, stay and play is a bit of an alien concept here. Quite a few parents assumed that we were providing free child care and tried to leave their children. Indeed, one lady managed to leave a 4-year old and despite several phone calls did not return for her, simply sending a young girl, the child's cousin to collect her at closing time. We ran two sessions last week and during the mornings I saw much to be proud of in the work of the student volunteers. Despite regular lessons my Chichewa is still pretty poor and without the students to translate Lyndsey and I would have been in trouble I fear! Some of the children have never got that near to an azungu before, and a few were anxious, or even cried at first, but we seem to have got over that problem fairly quickly. The first week we had the problem, common with Parent and Toddler sessions the world over I daresay, that the parents all sat on chairs around the edge of the room rather than getting down on the floor to play with the children, but Lyndsey, who is made of sterner stuff than I am, got over that one by hiding all the chairs! A few extra zitenje on the floor and most mums and one or two dads were down on the children's level and exploring the toys. Many of the toys are completely outside the experience of most of the parents, never mind the children. One mum told me, to my astonishment, that she had never seen a black baby doll before. Dolls are too expensive for working people to buy for their children and are all imported and apparently all white! I checked this out in Shoprite, the South African supermarket, and certainly there it was true. Thanks to the generosity of fundraisers in the UK we have four black baby dolls, twin boys about 9 inches high and a boy and a girl of about 16 inches. I remember writing about the girl when she arrived some months ago, and how impressed the students were with her. Unfortunately when we moved classrooms she was packed in a box which has disappeared into a container with a lot of other equipment to await the opening of the Children's Centre, but all three boys have been objects of wonder both to the children and to the staff of the IT college where we have our classroom. When I first casually carried the larger one dangling by the leg across the car park to the classroom several people gave shocked gasps at my ill treatment of the 'baby'! There was horror too that he was naked. I was told more than once that I should get him some clothes as soon as possible. By the time I reached the entrance to the building I was obliged to think of a name for him. Rather hastily, without due consideration I called him 'Mavuto' which means problem. This is unfortunate because this is a name which the Malawian ECD Staff Training Manual cites in the Child Protection section as being an abusive name to give a child! Now I cannot change it! Every day someone asks me 'How is Mavuto?', and there is much hilarity as I answer 'He is in the filing cabinet' or 'I have locked him in the office!' Rachel, who runs the tailoring project, has made him some dark brown shorts and a satin shirt in golden yellow! He is very smart. The twin babies who were I think donated by a friend of Sarah's were christened by the man who cleans our office and keeps us supplied with flasks of hot water to make tea. His name is Cosmos and his brother is called Abby, so the dolls were named after them. They too have tailor made clothes, but in their case the shorts are navy and the satin pale blue. Children as young as 18 months have been seen in 'Stay and Play' with Mavuto, Cosmos or Abby strapped to their backs with scraps of chitenje cloth. They are regularly breast fed, and given imaginary nsima to eat!

The fuel shortage continues so we have not been out of Blantyre at the weekend for some weeks now. There have been a number of barbeques. Since the weather has been very hot we are swimming most days at the moment. Last weekend Sarah and I went up the Way of the Rosary and rather adventurously left the way-marked track and found our way straight down the side of the mountain to emerge opposite the Beehive site next to the secondary school. This week all the female volunteers had an evening at Zoe's flat where she cooked us chicken and pasta and we consumed considerable quantities of wine! We read magazines, watched TV and all had our hair restyled with Zoe's GHDs! Mitsidi baking club is still alive and well. This week we made Granny Boyd's biscuits, a sort of chocolate shortbread, and bread. The choir continues to practice on four lunchtimes each week. I am still having trouble getting my tongue around the Chichewa words. David will be away next Thursday for our Chichewa lesson so I have arranged with Paul, our teacher that he will go through the songs and tell me what they mean. I hope that if I understand them, I will remember them better! It is just as well that it is a CD we are making, not a DVD, at least no one will know that I am reading the words! There is a choir festival this weekend and I was looking forward to going despite the walk of four km each way, but unfortunately not enough people were able to go, largely for financial reasons as it apparently costs a couple of hundred kwacha each to go (roughly a days' wages) and most members are saving their spare cash to go to the studio to make the CD.

Oh! And the rains have come. Actually it is about a week since it rained during the day, but when it did it really poured. Proper rainy season rain! It has rained steadily through the night on two occasions. The local people are busy with their hoes, digging ridges to plant maize. It is still hot, but now it is humid as well. I am beginning to understand wht one of the phrases from my Chichewa lessons is 'You have a sweaty head'! I certainly have a sweaty head quite frequently. I have had my hair cut really short so that it sticks up in spikes on the top of my head. It took a bit of getting used to. Every time I looked in the mirror I wondered if it was really me, but now that it has been done for about six weeks I have got used to it and I like it! I had it done again this morning. It is certainly a bit cooler, which has to be a good thing.