Home for Christmas

Well, I am not home yet, but I am on the way! I have completed the first leg of my journey and am sitting in the café at Lilongwe airport with nearly eight hours to go until my flight. There are only two of the fast and comfortable buses each day from Blantyre to Lilongwe and they are at 6.30am and 4.30pm. Theoretically it is just about possible to make it to the airport in time if you take the afternoon bus, but there's not much room for slippage so I decided not to risk it. If I describe the journey today you will understand why! I set the alarm for 5.00am and got up to finish the last minute bits of packing. I decided to travel light in the end and have only really brought clothes for two weeks and Christmas presents with me. I was going to bring some of my books home so that I don't have too much to bring next year but Zoe talked me out of it when I said I couldn't decide what I would need over the next few months. She said that I'd brought them for the good of the project and if I couldn't take them all back with me they'd find a way to get them home. Rita decided to travel with me to Lilongwe as her partner was arriving on the 3 o'clock plane for a couple of week's holiday. Hugh kindly offered to drive us to the bus. He was very puzzled to find the Land Rover covered in mud and with the diff lock in Low. A mystery since he drove it home himself last night and has had the keys all night. Half way up the Mitsidi road we saw that a vehicle had obviously left the track during the night and left deep tyre marks in the maize field. We speculated that perhaps the Land Rover had been used to pull the mystery vehicle out, but who drove it? Did they have to hot-wire it? Who did they have to pull out? I am sure Hugh will solve the puzzle when he gets back! Our tickets required us to be at the bus station for 6.30 to travel at 7.00am, but the bus did not pull in until about three minutes past seven. There was a rush to get luggage in the compartments under the coach and then to find seats. Tickets were for numbered seats but obviously mistakes had been made and when I got to No. 19 it was occupied. Many seats had been sold twice so it became a free-for-all. Rita managed to grab a couple of seats at the back. Possession is nine tenths of the law! We sat tight and watched the poor conductress arguing with people, persuading them to get off and catch a slightly less posh bus half an hour later. Eventually enough people gave in and we were off – half an hour late. The trip is supposed to take four hours and to get you to the middle of Lilongwe just after 11.00am, but the bus dawdled along, taking its time for no apparent reason. Perhaps you use less fuel if you go slowly? We all had to get out at a road block for the police to walk up and down the bus. Goodness knows what they were looking for. Just the other side of Ntcheu we pulled into the side of the road for a black-market refuel. At first the TVs failed to descend from the ceiling and the film played to the ceiling. When they eventually came down properly the sound track was a couple of seconds behind the film. The end of the film disappeared and was replaced by strange music videos. It was all a bit surreal and this was the Executive Bus! We finally arrived at the Palace Hotel in the middle of Lilongwe at nearly half past one, after I had had to leap out of the bus at the stop before to prevent my luggage being left on the pavement where someone had removed it to in order to retrieve their own. Rita and I hastened into the hotel for a much needed comfort break, phoned our lift to the airport to tell them where to meet us and went into the dining room for lunch. Here we ordered a chicken salad which was supposed to come with mozzarella, seasonal fruit, tomatoes, lettuce and a balsamic vinegar dressing. When it arrived it was drenched in salad cream and was only chicken, lettuce and tiny scraps of tomato. An extra bowl of salad cream came on the side, together with French dressing made with vinegar that was definitely not balsamic! When we complained, the charming waiter went to the kitchen and came back with a message from the chef that the description on the menu was a typing error! The only bit of the trip that went well was our lift, and even here we were not collected by the person in the original plan. However the replacements were charming, efficient and helpful and managed to book Rita and Andrea (sp?) somewhere to stay, and sort out a 'deluxe' bus back to Blantyre for them tomorrow. Now here I am at the airport and the only café closes at half past five so I will have to have an early meal. My flight is not until 11.55pm.

The last week has flown by. David and I have taught a session on planning routines for children in day care five times, once each to the staff who are going to work with the different age groups in the children's centre. i.e. babies, toddlers, 3-4s, 4-5s and 5-6s. At one session or the other we saw 58 of our 68 students. I have been very concerned that because of the long delay to the opening some of the students will choose not to work in the children's centre or complete the course. In some ways this might not matter as we are going to open with fewer children than we planned and more staff, but nevertheless I would be sad to see some of them go.

Nairobi airport 6.30 am

I arrived at Nairobi airport in pitch darkness about an hour ago. International air travel is so weird from the point of view of meals! We had macadamia and cashew nuts between Lilongwe and Lusaka. We must have been given breakfast, Continental, at about 2.00am as we left Lusaka. The departure gates here in Nairobi are in a curious semicircular building with a corridor that feels as though it is about half a mile long. I spent about twenty minutes idly wandering along the full length of it looking for somewhere comfortable to sit. There are plenty of hard plastic chairs with rigid arms, and there are open doors to first class and Government lounges with huge leather armchairs that look as though they could each accommodate a small family, but these of course are out-of-bounds. There is a café at each end of the semi-circle and I ended up by the window of one of these watching the sky fade from deep navy blue, through iron grey, to pearl and eventually to palest turquoise streaked with grey and pink fluff. The whole process took only about fifteen minutes.

The most significant event of this week has been the handover of the Children's Centre keys from Hugh (site engineer) to Sarah (Daycare Manager). Sarah spent all of Thursday transferring toys and equipment from the container to one of the downstairs playrooms. Hurrah, no more searching for things in a hot container! More significantly it begins to feel as though we really will be opening the Children's Centre in January. There is an awful lot to do though between now and then and I feel a bit guilty about my trip home for Christmas. However it was planned and booked when we still thought the Children's Centre would open in September so I shall just have to be forgiven. After all this time though, I regret that I shall not be involved in the layout of the rooms. I feel less sorry that I shall not be involved in all the cleaning that will have to happen before the place is fit for children. The area around is still a building site with all the dust and muck that that involves, and it is the rainy season so all sorts of mud and guck comes in on the feet of the workmen who are still installing kitchen units, toilet partitions and so on. However the Centre is beautiful. Even on the hottest days it is cool inside. The walls are painted soft pastel shades (Steiner would approve!) There are built in concrete sinks for water play. There is plenty of light and air. The downstairs rooms open onto grassed areas which are not generous, but bigger than I originally feared, and the upstairs rooms have covered balconies where we can put sand and water play etc to extend the play space. I believe it truly may be the most beautiful Early Years Education Centre in Malawi.

What about children I can hear you ask. Well we are making progress here too. There are three types of places in the centre: paying places for the children of working parents, subsidized places for a very limited number of children of Beehive workers, and sponsored places for local children in need. We think the paying places will fill up slowly at first as parents will wish to see how the nursery operates before they part with their hard earned cash, but yesterday was the first of a series of open days to show new parents what the Centre will be like. We spent much of Friday setting up the Toddler room for play and it looked very nice when we had finished. There was a cosy book corner, puppet theatre, low shelves for children to help themselves to toys, puzzles and games, a dinosaur play mat, a choice of construction sets, baby play corner, home corner, sand and water play. If it didn't look exactly like a UK setting, it was certainly more like one than anywhere else I have seen in Malawi, but with an obvious African slant. Mavuto, Cosmos and Abel smiled out from buggies and chairs in the home corner and looked as though they thoroughly approved of their new home. Still not found the girl doll! I expect we'll discover her in a box in the next few days! I wonder if we actually received any bookings at the open day. I do hope so.

Recruitment for the other types of place is definitely not going to be a problem. Sarah and David have been working together to establish a committee responsible for allocating sponsored places. They have built on the relationships we have developed gradually over the duration of the training and have involved CPOs, people from the local health clinic, churches and the police. A system of visits with either David or Sarah and one of the CPOs has been developed and then the committee decides who will get the places. So far no one who has been offered a place has refused. There has been a deluge of applications for the Beehive places which are subsidized on a sliding scale according to income. Thirteen of the thirty available places have been given to families whose children previously had subsidized places at a local nursery. For the other 17 places there is a lot of competition. Again there will be a committee to decide how the places will be distributed according to a set of criteria. It won't be easy though. Wherever we go people approach us with forms, practically begging us to choose their child. The Children's Centre is seen as a huge and life-changing opportunity for the children.

3 hours later

I have spent the time wandering up and down the semi-circular corridor and exploring what Nairobi airport has to offer. I think I have probably been in every shop but have managed to spend nothing except in the coffee shop. I struck out down a spar from the main track and discovered a Kenya Airways lounge which is really only for Business class and Gold Card customers but the guy on the door must have felt sorry for me because he checked I was really travelling with Kenya Airways and then let me in. Now I am ensconced in a very comfortable bright orange upholstered armchair and I don't intend to move until I can board the plane!

So to continue with the last week in Malawi before my trip home for Christmas…. I find it hard to feel Christmassy in the heat, and it has been hot, and humid too because it has rained properly two or three times this week. On Wednesday Mary and Zoe had a Christmas/Going home party which was fun and I managed to spend most of the time talking to Mary's friends who I don't know very well, so that was interesting and stimulating. When I get back in January I will have a couple of other projects working with children in Blantyre to visit so that will be good. Drank too much wine, but hey, it's Christmas! I am quite looking forward to being cold for a couple of weeks, although I daresay I shan't really enjoy it when it happens. My brother and sister have promised to bring my winter coat when they meet me at the airport and I have a pair of socks in my handbag to put on with my sandals before I get off the plane. Not an attractive look, but better than being too cold. What I am really looking forward to is snuggling under the duvet in my own bed with a hot water bottle. Being cosy is a bit hard to achieve with tiled or concrete floors, and it's months since I slept with anything more than a sheet over me. On the way to this lounge I met a Kenyan airport worker on the stairs complaining of the cold, its 17 degrees here, much cooler than Malawi at the moment, but hardly cold. The paper said max 7 and min 2 in London last time I looked.

The Beehive site was strangely quiet on Friday. The construction department shuts down for at least three weeks over Christmas and Friday was the Christmas party. Admin keeps going for another week so I will miss that party which is the one we in the Children's Centre get invited to. In the morning I helped with the setting up of the Open Day but in the afternoon I prepared to go away for two weeks, writing David a list of things to do in my absence to prepare for the training to go smoothly in January, admiring the new Mother Teresa uniforms, finishing drafting a couple of policies Sarah asked me to look at, and actually doing my filing and tidying my desk. I regret that I shall miss making the CD with the choir and I really wish them well for the next three days when they will be travelling to Chilobwe to sing. In the end it proved terribly expensive to pay all those individual bus fares, so in exchange for swapping the preferred dates for dates in the holiday Hugh has helped us to arrange a truck and driver to take everybody. A friend of mine has offered to contribute towards the cost of fuel. The choir themselves have raised MK5000 and my friend and I have chipped in MK10,000 between us. This is not quite enough, but Hugh has kindly said it will do, so this recording is really going to happen at last. I think I really need this holiday. I am desperate to see the family again and cannot wait for four days over Christmas in a Youth Hostel in Wales with 17 of us all together. I shall miss a lot in Chilomoni but I am sure I will come back refreshed and ready for whatever happens. At last we shall be working with children every day. It's been a long wait!