Tuesday evening. On Sunday I spent most of the day working. I had arranged a meeting with the Centre Manager and Practice Leader on Monday so that I could report back to them what I had seen in the rooms on my four day-long visits and what i thought were the training issues I had noticed. Therefore I had to get my notes in order so that I could sound at least partly on top of the problems in the rooms. Actually I went to the most needy room first and was rather concerned after the first day, but as you have probably picked up as I moved up the school the organisation and play opportunities got better and better so by the end of the visits I was a lot more optimistic. Anyway I have come up with five lists of action points, one for each room and a longer list of issues that require a bit more action and support across the whole centre. Some things we will approach via formal training sessions like last week’s challenging behaviour, and others through supporting Room Leaders and Care Givers to make changes to their practice in the rooms to provide more learning opportunities and child-initiated activities. There is, I fear, a huge issue about resource management which I have to tackle with the Practice Manager as it is her responsibility to distribute the resources we have, and there are more of those than I feared on the day I wrote about being in the baby room. Anyway I had spent about 6 hours making these lists and was just writing the last few lines when the phone rang and it was the Centre Manager reporting that she has Malaria. She sounded dreadful, poor lady and I was quite worried about her, but she has been to the hospital and now she is beginning to feel better , thank goodness. She is an extremely hard worker. I do hope she doesn’t come back until she has made a full recovery. My Monday therefore had to be rearranged as I did not want to give out my lists until I have discussed them with her. Actually the Practice Manager and I spent the whole afternoon in a series of cupboards and containers! We were just about to start this process at about 8.30am when the receptionist came to the Practice Manager and said that there were 6-8 teachers and 60 children in the reception area and that they had come to spend the morning in the daycare classes. Neither the Practice Manager nor I had heard anything about this visit. It must have been arranged by the Centre Manager whose fevered state must have caused her to forget to ask anyone to cover for her. The Practice Manager stepped into the breach magnificently and took the whole group into the garden and divided them into four groups of 15 children and a couple of adults, gave them a little talk about expected behaviour, toilets etc and sent them off, one group to each room. She wanted to make a video record of the visit but the person who has the camera was not to be found so I leant her my phone and off she went. This piqued my curiosity so I followed her and was pleased and proud to see how well each room had adapted to receiving 15 more children with no notice. Also I was pleased to note that my comments to the Room Leaders on my day visits had not gone unnoticed and the quality of activities across the centre was better than it had been on the visit days. Everyone was very keen to learn and no-one had taken offence at the changes I had suggested verbally. By the time they get my lists each room will already have addressed at least one or two of the issues. This visiting school is all charitable, run by Chinese people and takes only orphans.   Many of the children seemed to integrate well with our children and there was a lot of nice play going on but a few of the children seemed very quiet and withdrawn which was rather worrying. Their Care Givers were all Malawian and I was able to ask them a few questions about the school and how it worked. Their Chinese leader’s English was only a little better than my non-existent Mandarin but she introduced me to one of the Malawian staff and I was able to ask a few questions. The children only get to visit their families once a year for the summer holidays, they are taught Chinese and brought up as Buddhists, and fed a vegetarian diet, which is not very Malawian.  One of their staff did an ECD Cert at our John Paul II college and had a placement at Mother Teresa. This was the link that had made them visit.I was able to ask him why they had chosen to come and he said that he had suggested they come to get more ideas about what to do with the children, especially the younger ones. I don’t know if the Centre Manager has arranged a return visit but I think it would be a good idea, not for the children but for a few staff. Back to resources and storage. There are toys and resources all over the place. A very crowded resource room, a container at Mitsidi, another container of things waiting to be mended at the construction site where the carpenters are based, some decking for repairing a wooden structure at the CC in a lean-to shed, and apparently a large basement full of stuff as well, which I haven’t seen yet. The stuff we have falls into three categories: fit to use, broken but mendable, fit only for throwing away. Oh no, four categories there is also perfectly good but not suitable. There is so much stuff waiting to be mended! There are clearly issues with getting access to the right person to do each job and of course there are financial implications as well. This will take a lot of working out I am sure! The other element to this muddle is that there is nothing remotely related to our wonderful weekly refuse collection and I’m not sure about the ability to take stuff to a local dump or recycling centre, but somehow I doubt it. There is a weekly collection of some kind from the CC but I haven’t yet discovered what exactly they will take or not take, or indeed whether you have to pay for it. I bet you do. My feeling is that the rubbish problem is not quite so bad as it was 12 years ago, but that does not mean that there is not a rubbish problem. The river that runs by the market in Blantyre is a sight to behold, full of plastic and all sorts. It doesn’t seem to smell as bad as it used to, but maybe that is because the weather continues to be cool. Anyway our lovely admin lady, don’t know what her job title is but it is much more important than that sounds, tells me the way to get rid of things is have a sale, price everything at under k1000 and watch the staff take it all away to try and mend it for their own use. We can’t sell anything without her casting her eye over it first. So that is what we are going to do. Watch this space! Today I have had a bit of a different day. I took the morning off and met Mary, a friend from last time I was here, for coffee in a great cafe in Blantyre and we sat for 2 hours catching up and reminiscing. She is wonderfully extrovert and Irish and burst into the cafe in a striking zebra print trouser suit and enveloped me in an enormous hug. She used to run three Montessori nursery schools and was able to help me by recommending someone who can do a bit of introductory Montessori training for CC staff. Apparently she knows just the person. I hoped she might. She has invited me to go and stay with her and her new husband on his tobacco farm about an hour up the Zomba road. I think that will be fun. This afternoon I had a meeting planned with the ECD trainer to discuss curriculum content and accreditation, but sadly I arrived to find that she was in Zomba. Later I messaged her and she was contrite. Something came up and she forgot me! However this gave me an unexpected free afternoon and I managed to do all sorts of fiddly tasks that I had been putting off. I arranged for certificates to be made for the CPD trainings we are doing. I wrote a paper to prepare for a meeting to discuss exactly what is going into the CPD training programme for the next year. I got contact details for a person at the Catholic University of Malawi to try and arrange a visit for me, the Centre Manager and the ECD trainer, and I said to Father Felix, who is head of the whole Mary Queen of Peace complex that I would like also to visit Chancellor College in Zomba where they are already running ECD degree courses, and he said he’d like to do that too and he’d fix it up for us, so that was a result. Since then I’ve had a cosmopolitan tea consisting of pizza, roast potatoes, guacamole, tomato and mozzarella salad and potato salad. How’s that for a combination! Also I’ve written this screed! Hope you enjoy it.