A Reunion

Saturday - I was up early, excited about seeing my friend again and I was ready long before it was time to leave. We met at a restaurant in Blantyre which has an excellent play area and we spent nearly three hours there, playing with the children Amell and Joshua, having lunch and talking, talking, talking. Bhavna was a star, keeping Amell amused with paper crafts and games and taking him to the play apparatus, while their mum and I caught up on the last twelve years and compared notes on the changes to the Malawian ECD curriculum, tales of training and trainers at Beehive and elsewhere, what had happened in our private lives and so on. It was a great relief to me that she shares almost exactly my view on the 2017 Curriculum and Learning and Development Standards documentation. I said I felt that though they both came from the same government department they read as though they were written by separate teams and although both are coherent in their own right, they have not been designed to work together. The result of this is that my friend made the same decision as Mother Teresa Children’s Centre and continued to work with the earlier version of the Malawian Curriculum as annotated by me in 2012. This is all very flattering but leaves me with a dilemma. Do we change what we are doing and move to recording children’s progress against the 2017 curriculum, for which we would have to write our own system for measuring the progress of individual children and invent our own measures; or do we use the earlier ones? We will have to do that for children under-3 as the 2017 document asserts that the best place for under-3s is with mothers and no longer describes a curriculum for them. Do we devise a system which correlates with the Malawian Learning and Development Standards, which would be easier as the documentation includes a useful table of standards for 0-2’s, 3-4s and 4-5s? Tempting, but children don’t start Standard 1 of Primary school until they are 6 so the needs of the last year of Eagle’s class would need to be considered. Or do we continue using the old system, which I sweated blood over 12 years ago and which both my friend and MTCC are still using. I did think it would be a legal requirement to update, but it looks like it is only a recommendation. I really am not sure what to do. Perhaps I should visit a few of the private schools with better reputations and see what they do? Dinner took ages to arrive but the time passed quickly. As you can see we found plenty to talk about. When it finally arrived we all tucked in with gusto, especially Amell whose children’s chicken and chips disappeared very quickly.. I had my second chambo of the trip, also with chips, but this time a whole fish which I managed to fillet as I ate with reasonable success. Amell had had his eye on an ice cream from the moment he arrived so we bought him a swirl of strawberry and vanilla. He had a pause in the middle of it to have a ride on the train which circled part of the garden and then half ate and half drank the rest in the car as we gave the family a lift back to Limbe where they were staying. I was so proud of my student. For the last five years she has worked for an NGO the other side of Lilongwe who work with families of refugees, mostly but not exclusively from Congo. She deals with about 400 pre-school children in a number of schools and is involved with training the staff as well as working with the children. Apparently no previous incumbent of the job has lasted more than a year and her outcomes are very good. Some of the previous people had ECD degrees but my friend puts down her success to the practical nature of her training, with placements in the children’s centre giving opportunities to put what she had learned into practice. She also is one amazing woman and I am glad that her employers value her. I said that if I come to Malawi again next year, which I may well do, I would love to come and visit her project and see what she has done. I was sad to drop her off in Limbe but so, so happy to have had to opportunity to see her again. I hope her journey home tomorrow is smoother than the outward bound trip. As we were in Limbe Bhavna took me to see a Beehive social enterprise which cleans recyclable bags for the Illovo Sugar Factory, thus reducing by about 80 percent the amount of plastic the factory contributes to our growing plastic disposal problem. It was interesting to see how this is done. Then we were off to Shoprite and Blantyre market for the usual shopping trip and watch Bhavna skilfully haggling down the price of fruit and vegetables and insisting that they cut open the water melons and prove they are good inside. I am sure the stallholders would have got at least half as much money again if I had been in charge of the purse! And so back to Mitsidi as dusk began to fall. Today we have two new residents at Mitsidi, an American fried of Vince’s and a Zimbabwean man who may well do some work for Beehive on our farm.