Wednesday - I spent the whole day delivering CPD training on sleep. In some ways it was cheating because it didn’t take too long to prepare as I have delivered sleep training so many times with both Sleep East and Contact. However it was different in some ways because of differences in cultural expectations. Most strikingly I found myself involved in a discussion about whether certain sleep problems, notably night terrors, might be the result of witchcraft. I tried to assure them that night terrors would be the result of physiological differences and that most children grow out of them by the time they are six, but not everyone was convinced! It was tiring delivering the same training twice in one day but bits of it were fun. I revived a game of Sleep Bingo that Joy and I invented about five years ago and it went down really well. I bought about 60 lollipops as ‘prizes’, although I made sure that everyone got one, and the last part of the course I taught a whole class of staff members busily sucking and with little sticks wobbling about in their mouths while they made notes on their handouts! We started the session with the name game involving introducing yourself with an adjective that starts with the same initial letter as your name, as in ‘I am Marian and I am Marvellous. Adjectives have to be positive but they do not have to be true! The next person introduces themself in the same way and then has to introduce the previous person also and so on around the circle in the manner of ‘My aunt went to market and she bought…’. We had some amusing adjectives such as ‘My name is Godfrey and I grow fast!’ but everyone entered into the spirit of the thing and helped out those of us who got stuck, and there was a lot of laughter. Thursday - Today was taken up with a visit to the Catholic University of Malawi (CUNIMA) with whom we hope to affiliate to deliver a properly accredited Diploma in ECD rather than our own Beehive Diploma as has been the case so far. As is common in Malawi this is a long and bureaucratic procedure. There have been a couple of previous meetings with the Catholic University and a committee has been set up at JP II to deal with a substantial document listing all the ways in which a satellite college of CUNIMA has to conform to the standards of the University. This is largely to do with governance and facilities which thankfully we have agreed are not something I need to be involved in, but I have read the entire document anyway in order to search for any references to the ECD courses we might provide, which are my concern. It is an impressive document which our registrar has colour-coded into green for ‘we meet the standard’, yellow for ‘nearly there’ and red for ‘we have a way to go’. Apparently it is gradually changing from red to yellow towards fully green. However it is nowhere near fully green yet. There are minutes of the meetings of the committee but apart from telling you that the meeting took place they are singularly uninformative! Full of such phrases as ‘the issues were discussed and the work was allocated to individuals’. Hmm? What are the tasks? Who is supposed to be doing what? Thank goodness governance etc is not my responsibility! There were no references to specific courses in the whole document, so no mention of ECD but the major problem for us is official accreditation of our course so that the qualification will be recognised across Malawi. Several people told me that they thought this would be automatic once we are part of the Catholic Uni but I couldn’t understand how this could be the case. What if our syllabus was rubbish?? ( it isn't, of course!). Hence scrutiny of the document. It transpires that we need to get the course accredited by the National Council for Higher Education. A pre-requisite for this is to get it accredited by TEVETA (Technical, Entrepreneurial and Vocational Education and Training in Malawi). Then I had my biggest stroke of luck so far. It appears that our ECD Trainer does work for TEVETA as an assessor of ECD courses, so she has all the info available and is pretty confident we meet all the expectations. She and I will be meeting next week to get this on the road. Hoorah! As for the application to CUNIMA we learned from our meeting with the Director of Academic Affairs that we don’t have to wait until our document is entirely green before we apply for affiliation, they will come and inspect after we apply and give us advice about the prioritisation of any red or yellow items. He recommended we get on with it asap, so since we got back I have been on a mission to get the application in.