Wildlife, Hobbits, Diploma Curriculum, Action points to improve practice and the Baby Room window is repaired.

Saturday. No zebra, giraffe or lion but one elephant, largely obscured by bushes, loads of impala, nyala, waterbuck, kudu, some hippos, warthog, lots of baboons and a selection of birds including vultures, several varieties of dove, bulbil, weaver birds and several other colourful but unidentified passerines. We drove around the reserve ourselves and were quite pleased with the numbers and variety of what we saw. My personal favourites were the baboon families with babies clinging to the long fur of their parents as they ran and swung themselves from tree to tree. There were some very nice hides which made splendid places to sit and contemplate the wonders of the natural world. Unfortunately they were also a good place to get out your picnic and bottle of wine and start to party. Where this was happening there was not much wildlife about! We had a very nice lunch of chambo and chips in the restaurant of a lodge and I spent far too much on souvenir Malawi t-shirts for my grandchildren, but I liked them and I don’t have time to spend a lot of money during the week. I am working so hard! The drives to and from Majete took about an hour and a half. On the way I noticed how much the villages around Blantyre have run into each other since I was here last. one now has to drive quite some distance from the centre of Blantyre before the patches of green between villages become significant in size. Eventually we made it to open countryside, some cultivated and some not. Then the road started to descend and we began to go down the mountain. The views were terrific and the temperature rose as we got closer to sea level and at the bottom of the escarpment it was much warmer than in Blantyre. By my standards the weather has been much better in Blantyre over the last week or so, reaching about 24 degrees some days, but to most Malawians it is still cold and in the morning people are still wearing woolly hats and winter coats to go to work. We stretched out our time at the reserve for as long as we could, leaving as dusk fell, having watched the sun set in a glorious golden blaze and popped in to the lodge again to see if the elephant had come out from behind his bush. Apparently he had, but we were too late and he had disappeared completely now. What a shame! We were the last day visitors to leave the reserve and set off in near darkness to take the road back up to Blantyre. Stopping only to buy a bottle of wine to accompany the left over rice and beans that were waiting to be warmed up for our supper. Sunday. Sunday was a quieter, more domestic day. We did our usual weekend market trip and went to Shoprite for azungu luxuries, especially cheese! I did a mountain of washing for the CC of all the grubby fabric things we had discovered in the resource room. After lunch I did a bit of work and later Bhavna and I went for coffee in a treehouse cafe in a suburb of Blantyre. It was quite an experience. I kept expecting hobbits and gnomes to appear around the corner! Monday. Hoorah! The Daycare Manager was back, feeling a lot better although not fully recovered I fear. She still has a nasty cough, but she refused to go home and rest when I suggested it. We spent the morning catching up with what I have done for the last week and she was pleased with the progress I had made with windows and nappies, although we are not yet completely there with either project. I gave her my lists of action points for improving practice for each room, and for the whole centre, for her approval and updated her on the next 2 CPD trainings on Sleep and Play. At the beginning of the afternoon I saw the ECD lecturer and we discussed the curriculum for Diploma students. This conversation led to a big job for me to insert all the aspects of my curriculum from 12 years ago that did not originate from Malawian documentation into her curriculum which includes all things Malawian updated with the 2017 changes. I spent all afternoon until suppertime cross referencing everything in my curriculum to hers and then writing new items to cover everything that is not already in there. After supper and catching up on the events of the day we retired to bed quite early. I think we were all pretty tired and it was only Monday! Tuesday. And so to today. I was back to the curriculum by 7.15 this morning typing in all my additions in a contrasting colour so that when the ECD trainer checks it all she will immediately be able to see what is the original document and what are my additions. I finally threw down my pen, so to speak, at 11.30am to discover I was starving and went to make halloumi, tomatoes and toast for lunch. Now all I have to do to the curriculum is type up all the cross references to where items have gone to within the ECD trainers curriculum so that if anyone ever questions how rigorous the process was we can prove that it is all there. Phew! Then I walked to the CC through an area known as Zambia because it is where all the immigrant Zambian tinsmiths live. I was accompanied by the noise of craftsmen hammering sheets of metal into buckets, baths and pots. This afternoon I received the Daycare Manager’s approval to pass the action points on to the Room Leaders and then visited them all and talked them through what they have to do. I urged them to share it all with their Caregivers and then come back and ask any questions they may have. We are going to have a meeting with Room Leaders, Practice Leader, Daycare Manager and me to work out how best to tackle the action points for the whole centre but that will have to be next week as tomorrow is Sleep Training Day, on Thursday we are off to visit the Catholic University of Malawi and on Friday the Daycare Manager and I have an appointment with Bhavna to discuss all things financial. Busy! Busy! Oh.... and the broken window in the baby room is finally repaired!! And so the weekend will come round again. Bhavna and I have plans to disappear on a jolly trip to Zomba as we have a long weekend due to Monday being a Bank Holiday. Hoorah!!