Six weeks to go

Only six weeks until David and I say 'Goodbye' to all our students and set off for home. So much has happened in the time we have been here. We have had the chance to get to know our students very well in some ways, although of course because of the professional nature of the relationships, in other ways we do not know them at all. We have seen some of them develop as professional Care Givers at a rate that has been quite surprising. The CC has been open for only four months and already we have appointed a couple of Trainee Managers, eight Room Leaders and a number of special needs support workers. At last these people have full time jobs with Beehive. They have been working towards this for a long time. One of the new room leaders told me that on the night he went home with the news that he had got a full time job his wife was on the phone all evening, telling all their relatives and friends how proud and excited she was that he had a full time job. It is humbling to see this enthusiasm for a job which pays MK22500 a month which is equivalent to less than eighty pounds. I will never get used to the difference in standard of living and expectations in Malawi from what I have been familiar with at home. Of course not everything is directly comparable between the two cultures but the odds are really stacked against ordinary Malawians. The standard of education is so different. The priorities of the culture are different. The expected modes of behaviour are different. Undoubtedly religion occupies different profiles in very different societies. School has such different educational goals and opportunities. The majority of our students are still working a two-day week so that everyone has a chance to complete their Diploma. We have had to part company with a few because of theft, and a few because they were not working well with the children or not making any effort to do the work to complete their qualification. This has been sad, but I suppose in any group of 70 odd people there will be a few who will not make it for these reasons. The remaining fifty or so are slogging away with various degrees of enthusiasm and dedication at getting through the requisite number of assessed activities before we go home. Kirren has joined us now in assessing every day, and of course she will still be here for four or five months after we leave so she will be able to finish the training for any stragglers. I fear there will be more of these than we anticipated in January because we have been running the Centre as well as doing the training, but we are only human!

Some days I am so encouraged as I walk through the centre from room to room as everywhere I go I see Care Givers interacting with children and providing interesting and educational activities. Children run up to me and smile, calling 'Marianie, Marianie!' and wrapping their arms round my knees! Babies and Toddlers put up their arms to be lifted and hugged, four and five year olds call me over to show me what they have made. They sing to me in English and in Chichewa. Ever since my birthday they have sung 'Happy Birthday to you, How old are you now?' on an almost daily basis as I walk down the balcony! Birthdays don't hold the same significance here as they do for children in the UK. There are several parents of children in the children's centre who really do not know exactly when their children were born. There are a few who know the day and month of birth but don't remember which year, so we have had to make a guess about which class to put them in. I hope we have got it right! On other days I walk from room to room and notice groups of Care Givers chatting to each other while children amuse themselves, or occasionally sit looking sad. David was tearing his hair out the other day because one morning he saw this in one room after another, but I suppose none of these people has been working with children for more than four months and despite the training, the place of children in Malawian society is a far cry from the place of the average middle class UK child in a nursery school! We correct, we encourage, we praise, we teach, we explain the same things over and over, and bit by bit we see practice change and improve. We miss the volunteer room leaders who went home a few weeks ago very much. George is working hard to find more people who are willing to give up a few months to come out here and lead practice in the CC. It's certainly a job that needs doing! I do fear that without examples of good practice constantly in front of them, standards will slip as we have not been working together long enough for good practice to become embedded. We have however made a good start. I would like to see it built upon.

I assessed some interesting activities this week. One Care Giver had spent a considerable amount of time preparing little clay figures to illustrate a couple of folk tales. She chose this activity to demonstrate teaching towards a Moral and Spiritual milestone of the Malawian ECD curriculum to do with teaching the children core values of honesty and obedience to parents. At first I was a bit concerned about her plan as I thought a tale of disobedient children leaving a baby by a tree, where it swallowed a snake, which had to be removed by bringing the frogs from the river to put them by the baby so the snake would come out of the baby's mouth to eat the frogs, would be rather scary! However the children loved it, and this rather quiet and reserved Care Giver turned out to be an expressive and animated story teller. The children carefully packed all the little clay characters back in their box and took them off back to the class room to add to their resources. One of the Room Leaders in the Baby Room had made a lovely display of recent activities in that room, and looked at it with a child's grandmother for her assessment about working with parents and families. The grandma was surprised by how much the babies do while they are playing and was fascinated by the explanations the Care Giver gave of why we do these things and what the children are learning. I was proud then of what we have taught and how well some of the Care Givers have taken on the lessons and are now passing them on. One Care Giver did the assessment on MTCC as part of the community in Chilomoni and rather to my surprise she invited one of the cleaners from the IT College in to tell the children what she does for her living. The cleaner proved to be a bit of a natural teacher and told the children how lucky they are to be at MTCC and how they must work hard and then when they grow up they can be whatever they want to be. She herself she said would have liked to be a doctor, but she didn't do well enough at school and now wishes she had worked harder. She asked the children about their aspirations. It was interesting to note the differences between their replies and those of children of a similar age in UK. Several of the girls wanted to work in construction as their parents do on the Beehive site. One boy wanted to be a driver, There were a sprinkling of doctors and nurses. Nobody wanted to be a teacher or a Care Giver! The visitor then asked the children what they thought she did as a cleaner and they sprang to their feet and mimed mopping and polishing, hand washing, cleaning windows and all the things the CC cleaners do every day. Little Sheila who is five did such an accurate mime of clearing up spilled water on the floor with a cloth that I felt she must have actually done the job herself many times. The chat finished with a discussion of why we need to clean, and hygiene. I am struggling a bit with Care Givers who are very keen to complete assessments but are not giving sufficient attention to the fact that the primary purpose of them being there and proving to me that they have learned what we have taught them is that they should be providing high quality, targeted care and education for the children which should be based on observation, related to the curriculum and to their knowledge of child development. I have had a few activities that although alright in themselves are not based on the needs of individual children, and seem more designed to pass assessments than to educate children. Of course these do not achieve the marks for observation and so forth and therefore do not always pass the assessment, which can come as a surprise to the Care Giver! This week I have had cause to speak seriously to a number of students, pointing out again these key points and asking them to pull their socks up! We shall see next week how much of what I have said has been taken on board.