Extract from a letter to George

Extract from a letter to George Furnival at Krizevac

I'm repeating this here rather than writing something new as it tells last week's news pretty thoroughly.

As you can probably imagine we are working very hard to get the Children's Centre off the ground and running properly. There is lots of good news. Firstly our target no. of children for the end of February according to the budget was 30 and although on Feb 29^th we had 29 children we do now have 30! The next step is to bring it up to 48 by the end of March and that will be more of a challenge. We have a Fun Day/Open Day planned for next Saturday and David and Kirren have been untiring in their efforts to spread the word about it. I do hope it all pays off. We are all looking forward to seeing lots of potential fee-paying parents with their children in tow, bringing their dollies and teddies for lots of jolly activities!

It is such a joy to see the children every day and to observe how quickly they are learning things. It is the case all over the centre but probably shows most in the 4-6s room. Children who had never made any attempt to write or recognize any letters were to be seen last week chalking their names on the concrete floor of the balcony! There are some great displays on the walls and much of the work is named by the children themselves, some with clearly recognizable names and others with a clear initial and final letter but a bit less well formed in between. This class has been particularly fascinated by the building site and the children were allowed to go on a visit and sit on the little digger. They were so excited and Jennie has covered a big notice board with their drawings and the comments they made. They have also drawn some great self-portraits and their pictures of some of the staff are a joy to behold!

The 2-4s are the biggest class at the moment and probably also the biggest challenge, but I have been so pleased at the way they have settled in. For the first couple of weeks a few of them were rather unsettled. It made me sad to see their little faces as their mums disappeared down the balcony to go to work. In the UK we would have had a settling in routine with visits of varying length, but here there is little regard for such luxuries, 'They will get used' Is the phrase that pops up all the time, and it is true, eventually they do! I have enjoyed seeing the toddlers get used to working with paint, glue, crayons etc. The first time they painted they had never seen anything like it before, but now, after two months they have gained in confidence and have painted hands, feet, rolled marbles in paint, spread it all over the table, and so on.

The baby room is a lovely place to visit. There are only 5 or 6 children in here at the moment so it has a tranquility that it probably won't keep as the numbers go up. These little people seem to be busy every moment that they are awake. Their theme for the last few weeks has been 'All about me', and they have done such lovely things. They have drawn round each other and have cut-outs of the whole class on the wall. On the window is a display of little painted footprints showing how tall each child is. For Thando's second birthday they had a party for which they made jelly and iced biscuits. They have had such fun in the home corner making meals with dried pasta, and on one memorable morning they had flour, water and shredded pumpkin leaves and immersed themselves in making nsima and vegetables for all the dolls and the Care Givers. What a delight!

David and I are on the move every minute! There is so much to be done. The practical part of the course is more or less on schedule and the students generally seem very keen to get the tasks out of the way. They want those Diplomas after waiting so long. It has been a great help to have Kirren here and we definitely made the right decision to postpone the second cohort until at least September. I have been focusing on the people management and hope I have put a fairly robust supervision and appraisal system in place. We have had our fair share of little misunderstandings and personality clashes to sort out, and there have been a few thefts, and a few people who want to be paid for being there but don't seem to want to do much work, but there have been so many more lovely things happening. The students mostly love having children to practice on. It is a delight to see the confidence of the students growing, and one or two of them are doing excellently. I don't know if you read my last blog entry, but I describe one morning when I went into each playroom one after the other and something lovely was happening in each one. Sometimes we tear our hair out a bit at the frustration of encouraging people who have been through an education system in which putting your head above the parapet is definitely discouraged, to think creatively and originally, but when it happens I either want to hug them, or to cry with pride!

This week we put up a notice inviting applications for 8 full time 'Trainee Room Leader' posts. The requests for application packs have been overwhelming. It would not surprise me if we got an application from every single Care Giver. We are also offering 25 places on a JPII Leadership course. So far we have 38 people signed up so we shall have to select those who show the most leadership promise.

I cannot believe that there are only 5 weeks left until Diddy, Joan and Jennie fly home, all on the same day. We shall miss them so much. I was very pleased that Vince agreed in a recent meeting that we could have two 'Practice Leaders' one for under 4s and one for over 4s in their stead. I have a horrible feeling that it was me that was supposed to let you know so that you could start the recruitment process. I do hope you've heard from another source, but if you haven't then I apologise for the delay and urge you to do your best, as you always do, and get us some good people. The students are doing well but there is no substitute for demonstration of good practice if you want Care Givers to learn to do the job well and we shall miss the Room Leaders a lot. I am really looking forward to handing all the management stuff over to Alison and going back to being a teacher full time. I like the people-based side of things, but am not very good at 'stuff', fortunately David and now Kirren have fewer inhibitions about getting on the phone and sorting things out. I have done my best, and David and Kirren have been amazing, but none of us can keep up this pace of work for ever, and without the Room Leaders….

So tell Alison how thrilled we are that she is coming out so much earlier than we first thought.

Vince has given his permission for the Annotated Malawian ECD Curriculum that David and I have produced to be made available as a free download from the Krizevac website, so Chris has made it into a pdf file for me and it is attached. It would be great if you could sort it out for me. I have already had two requests for it from other NGOs working with children in Malawi. I'll just email it to them.