Clearing out the Resources Room, Special Needs Group and we set off to conquer Mulanje (well Jeff is to do the conquering!)

Thursday was clear out the Resources Room day and it was quite a job! The ECD tutor managed to gather a dozen ECD student volunteers to help us. We all donned zitenge and some put on masks and plastic aprons against the dust as well. The Practice Leader was a star. Two nights ago she sat up all night at the hospital with a friend who was giving birth, she was at work on Wednesday and she made a magnificent job of supervising everyone to bring all the resources that were not actually on shelves (and there were loads of them) out onto the terrace at the back of the CC and sort out what we were going to keep, what we were going to sell and what was real rubbish and needed to be got rid of. I did not always agree with her but I tried hard not to veto too many decisions, stepping in only if something was truly unsuitable or if she wished to dispose of some thing that children could really benefit from. We managed pretty well I think. Once the floor was clear we fetched mops and buckets and cloths and washed down the floor and shelves. To do the shelves we had to clear them of boxes of resources, sort the resources into sensible categories and relabel them with clear indications of what was inside. I cannot guarantee that this has been done as thoroughly as I would like, but it is all much cleaner and tidier than it was. By lunchtime everyone was pretty tired, it was physically quite demanding work. Beehive was providing a free lunch so I took them all to the kitchen and Hall where the children from the school eat and they all settled down to vast plates of nsima, fish and tomato sauce and I went beck up to the office for my vegetarian lunch which today was vegetables in tomato sauce with rice. Once sated the students stoically returned to help us sort and return to the shelves all the stuff that had been stacked on the ground outside. Of course there was not enough space on the shelves despite the big piles for binning and selling, and my idea of sorting is rather more exacting than that of the average Malawian, but again we managed a fairly acceptable compromise. I struggled to make them understand why it is not best for children’s learning if you put all the plastic construction materials of every conceivable type into the same box. I insisted however and we now have separate containers for Duplo, Lego, Megablocks, Waffles, Sticklebricks etc. Phew! We were forced to abandon the idea of sorting all the boxes of books into subject areas on the same day. We shall have to raise another set of volunteers for that job. The exhausted Practice Leader failed to make it into work on Friday morning and I cannot say I am surprised. She looked exhausted by the end of the day and on top of a missing night I think she deserved a good rest. Friday started with a delightful visit to the SEND group run by the Outreach team in the other half of the CC from the daycare. This group was led by another ex-student of mine and I could not have been more proud. She led a team of 4 other Caregivers in a parent and child group for children with special needs that was well thought out, well presented and clearly appreciated by mothers and children alike. They followed a similar format to that used in the daycare, starting with Circle Time in the garden and then moving indoors to a room set out for free flow play and ending up with porridge and banana for everyone before they set off for home. The Circle time was a delight. My student led with confidence and clarity, she slipped smoothly from Chichewa to English ensuring everyone understood everything. She called all the children and mothers by name, she was enthusiastic and sensitive, inviting the mothers to lead prayer and songs. She followed the usual format looking at today’s weather, asking which day of the week it was and then talking about what they all did on a Friday. I was happy to hear the song ‘Hello Mr Sun’ that Lindy taught the students 12 years ago. The mothers asked to lead, mostly sang in Chichewa and everyone joined in with gusto. Then it was story time. My heart sank as the Caregiver leading got out the Children’s Bible, opened it at a page with a lot of writing and a dull black and white picture and said we were going to hear a story about Joshua and the fall of Jericho. These are SEND children with a tendency to short attention span, I thought. But I need not have worried. This Caregiver was also excellent. She produced a large bag of props and told the story extempore. The walls of Jericho were a Batman castle turned backwards so the logos didn’t show and it made a very effective grey walled city. Joshua was a small blue knitted teddy who led a band of followers of bears of different colours. The story was told in Chichewa so of course I did not get all the details but first the teddies took turns to put wooden blocks on top of one another and then individual children were invited to come forward and put blocks on top to build quite a substantial tower. Children were assisted appropriately according to their needs and everyone’s achievements were celebrated enthusiastically. When the walls finally tumbled down everyone was very happy! After this we all moved indoors. The room was set up with labelled learning areas (I’m not sure if they always do this or whether the labels were for my benefit). Each area had toys and equipment suitable for the area. There was the best painting activity I have seen since I arrived, with plenty of paint and the children choosing their own colours and following their own messy ideas without hindrance but with help if they needed it. There was sensory play with shredded paper which was thoroughly enjoyed by one of the older boys. A Tuff tray was filled with sand, stuck with leaves and twigs to make it forest-like and with many small toys and animals lurking within to be discovered and played with, also a tray of water on the side where I saw splashing going on, plastic animals having a swim and so on. There were books, home corner, problem-solving and construction areas too. My only regret was that mums once sat down were reluctant to move about and so children tended to spend most of the session in the two or three areas they could reach next to where their mum was sitting. However I reflected that the relationships and support networks set up by this group were just as important as the educational opportunities created for the children. The CGs were quietly busy, talking to parents, encouraging and supporting children in their play, observing, meeting small needs of both children and parents. One CG had been given the job of videoing the session which he carried out conscientiously. He was observant and I often spotted something interesting going on only to find that he was already there, recording it. I do hope that I will be able to have a copy of that video. It would be a great teaching aid and also a good fundraiser I think. After playtime came snack time. This was a pretty substantial snack. There was a large plate of likuni phala (fortified porridge of maize and soya) for each mother and child, too much for the small children and enthusiastically finished up by the mums, followed by a banana. These children had a wide range of disabilities; Down’s, Cerebral Palsy, learning delays and disabilities, autism, but all were able to eat and enjoy the porridge. After snack, families began to leave for the walk home. There are 48 families registered for the group at the moment but my student tells me that many live a very long walk away and some choose to make the considerable effort only once a fortnight. I think there were about 27 children at today’s session. After all had gone home the group leader and I met and talked through the session and I gave her a box full of SEND resources I have collected over the years. Now and Next boards, materials for making visual timetables, sleep passes, Green and Red words information, reminders for positive management of challenging behaviour and a couple of little books, one on sleep and one on behaviour to support parent’s of children with disabilities. She was delighted, even though it was not much; it all fitted neatly in a box not much bigger than a shoe box. This afternoon Bhavna, Jeff and I set off for Mulange. Jeff is to run in the Porter’s Race tomorrow and Bhavna and I are along for the ride. We are staying in a lodge at Likubula at the base of the mountain. Jeff will be doing a 14 and a half mile circuit, climbing about 6000 feet in the process. Rather him than me but he has been training hard. Bhavna and I will be doing well if we make it to the waterfall which is at about 1400 feet.

Bank Holiday, finalising the curriculum, training day and preparation for an onslaught on the resources room.

Monday was a quiet day. It was a Bank Holiday for Independence Day. I spent the morning blogging about the Way of the Cross in the shade on the khonde. Bhavna and I went for lunch at the home of an Indian businessman who I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. He had a very pleasant house with a beautiful garden containing some lovely mature trees. We met his sister and sat on the khonde overlooking the swimming pool, talking business and politics, both Malawian and British. Indoors we were served delicious vegetarian food, all home made. It was very civilised. On Tuesday it was back to work. I went up to JP II College to talk to the ECD trainer about my additions to the curriculum for ECD Diploma students. I answered her questions and reassured her about her ability to teach, or find others to teach different parts of the curriculum and to my delight we agreed that the curriculum is ready to send off to TEVETA in the first stage of being considered for accreditation. This is a major success and she has agreed to send it off by Friday. Hoorah! I then wandered along the corridor to find the registrar who is spearheading the preparations to affiliate with the Catholic University and pass on the news that we are able to start this process before we have absolutely met all the requirements listed in the guidance for the procedure. Rather to my surprise this also went well and he promised me that he would send me the draft letter by Wednesday afternoon. I decided to walk back to the children’s centre and set off down the road back into central Chilomoni. I know the main roads of the township quite well but I do not know the maze of tracks and narrow pathways that make up the central part between the bigger roads. I didn’t want to get lost off the beaten track so I set off to walk the longer way that I was confident I knew. I had only gone a few yards when who should I spy coming up the hill towards me but the Daycare Manager who directed me down a narrow, sloping path and over a rickety bridge into the aforesaid maze. She stopped a passing seven year old and spoke to him rapidly in Chichewa and then said goodbye, turned back to resume her own journey and left me in the care of the little boy. He did a good job and after a few twists and turns I spotted a direction sign for the Children’s Centre and realised I knew exactly where I was. I groped about in my backpack to find a small reward for the child and came up with a bag of peanuts which he accepted with a big smile. I set off for the last couple of hundred yards to find the Room Leader of the Duck’s Room walking towards me. The Daycare Manager had phoned ahead to say that I was on my way and if I was lost they were to find me! Such is the way I am looked after here! Everyone is very kind. Wednesday is training day again. This week I was talking about Play. I chose to talk about play because on my observation days in the rooms I felt that I saw more adult led sessions than opportunities for children to explore materials and consolidate their learning through child initiated activities, I wanted to make caregivers think about how they can influence children’s play and learning by the way they set up the rooms for the free flow play that appears on their timetables three times a day. We tried to define exactly what free flow play is, both definitions, we revised Tina Bruce and the 12 features of free flow play, we defined adult-led, adult-initiated and child-initiated play, we talked about Loris Malaguzzi whose famous quotation is displayed on the wall in the CC but which no-one could remember, and we planned room layouts to encourage child- initiated activities. I sincerely hope that some of it will rub off onto the way the caregivers operate in the rooms from now on! PS Loris Malaguzzi said: ‘Tell me something and I will forget, Teach me and I will remember, Involve me and I will learn.’ I repeated the workshop in the afternoon for the second set of students. I gave both groups a bit of a lecture about caring for the resources we have, cleaning them after use and storing them so that you can see what is in each box and access it easily. Tomorrow is the day set aside for sorting out the resources room once and for all. We have borrowed 12 Early Years students from JP II to help us pull out everything and clean and sort everything that is worth keeping. The Practice Leader has made a host of bright yellow labels for all the sorted toys. She spent this afternoon locating buckets and cleaning cloths, mats to keep toys clean on the packed earth surface outside the resources room, and anything else she can think of to make the job go smoothly. So think of us tomorrow attempting to make oder out of chaos and rediscovering good resources that have been trapped behind the broken and worn out. Fingers crossed we shall be able to do it all in a day!

The Way of the Cross on Michiri Mountain

Bhavna and I had made arrangements to go to Zomba this weekend and I had really been looking forward to it. However it was not to be, firstly because of the bus breakdown that delayed my friend which made us decide not to go until Sunday morning. What with one thing and another, work on the house that Bhavna is overseeing, other work, (Bhavna spends even more of her evenings and weekends working than I do), we decided that we would go up the Way of the Cross on Sunday morning, work in the afternoon, and save Zomba for another weekend. When the morning came other things came up for Bhavna so that she had to go elsewhere, but I declined the offer to go with her and got her to drop me off at the bottom of the mountain. I have only 4 weeks left and so many places to see and old memories to update and I was determined not to miss out again on something I really wanted to do. I packed my rucksack with snacks and bottles of water. Picked up my binoculars, put on my walking shoes and got in the car, Bhavna sent me back for my hat - wise woman - and we were on our way. The bottom of the trail for the Way of the Cross felt very familiar. The entrance arch has a newly painted sign but the start was much as I remembered it. Vince had given me a pamphlet explaining each station so each time I reached one I stopped and read the explanations, meditations and prayers. There are 15 beautiful bronze (or are they copper??) plaques depicting the images of Christ on his journey from Golgotha to Resurrection. Or at least there should be, but no. 9 is missing. I wonder what happened to it? However I am leaping forward. The path from stations 1-3 is relatively flat. There are points on the path where the cross on the top is clearly visible, but tiny in the distance. The path was mainly packed earth with stones and a few embedded rocks, but relatively easy walking. The stations gave me goals for rest stops and at most of them I was able to find a comfortable rock in a patch of shade. This broke up the climb into manageable chunks for an overweight 69 year-old, which was most helpful. I set off at about 10.00am reflecting that I could have chosen a better time of day as I was likely to be up at the top at about noon. Mad dogs and Englishmen came to mind. For Malawi of course it was not hot, only about 24 degrees, but that is definitely quite hot enough for me! I remembered that when I first came up here in 2010 with Malcolm somewhere about half way up the path crossed a track big enough for cars. I remember this because we turned the wrong way along it and failed to find the rest of the Way, we had to turn and go back before we found it. As I passed station after station there was no sign of the track and eventually by station 12 I realised that I must have missed it altogether which you certainly could not have done 14 years ago. I resolved to look carefully for the place on the way down but again I failed to find it. I guess this shows how much can change in a few years. Thanking of change it was really striking how many fewer trees there were altogether. I remember there was much more shade on the way up when I was here before, especially for the last few stations which were in woodland including some quite big trees. Malcolm and I went up there one Good Friday and sat by the path bout 50 yards below the Cross and watched hundreds of worshippers emerging from the woods in family groups, choirs, elderly people, children clergy, mothers with tiny babies. Today one would be able to see them from much further away. Round about station 6, perched on my rock in the shade, I was passed by two men in black trousers and T-shirts with two dogs. I assumed that they were going up to pray but by the time I reached station 11, again concealed close to the plaque in the shade, they passed by on the way down. The first was carrying three 8 foot trees on his shoulder. The second had only one. ‘That’s not fair’ I thought, but he cut into the bushes, I heard a few swift strokes and a minor crash with much rustling of leaves, and he emerged with his second tree, strapped it to the first and heaving it on his back disappeared down the path at a rate of knots. The whole thing took only about 30 seconds. I wondered if they had marked their target trees on the way up. There is a huge dilemma here. Malcolm used to call such people ‘The tree-stealers” and certainly there has been a quite devastating removal of trees in the last few years. Most stumps are re-sprouting in the manner of trees that have been coppiced, but the new branches are only about eight feet high and I feel confident that they will be removed before they have a chance to replace the larger trees I remember from such a short time ago. Were the men I saw charcoal burners trying to make a living in the traditional way? Were they simply householders seeking to make their own charcoal for domestic use? The population is increasing at a terrific rate. There are not far short of half as many people again since I was last here. Around 50 percent of the population of Malawi is under 15 years old…… As I gradually climbed the path got steeper and rockier. I took my time and climbed steadily. There were very few people about. I probably passed fewer than 20 people in total both going up and coming down. There was a stillness about the atmosphere despite the fact that the sounds of Sunday in Chilomoni rose from the township in the blue haze below me; music from loudspeakers, singing from church services, shouts of traders. Closer to, there was rustling of leaves in the light breeze, birdsong, the scuttling of the odd lizard, murmured prayer from passing walkers. The sound of worshippers singing as they followed the Way of the Rosary on the next mountain drifted across the valley between. Finally I reached the top. For half an hour I was alone with my memories, the bird life, the views and the sunshine. I sat in a tiny patch of shade with my back against the plinth of the cross and took it all in. Grateful for the opportunity to be in this extraordinary place again, to have a role for which others are grateful and which makes me feel I have something to offer, for the chance to make relationships with people whose lives and backgrounds are so different from my own. Eight weeks is such a short time. On the way down I put the pamphlet in my bag and focussed on birds, lizards, butterflies and other insects, trees and keeping my feet on the steep rocky paths. The going was easier, it must have been because I didn’t stop more than once to sit in the shade, but it required concentration not to lose my balance. I took photos of flowers, saw unidentified butterflies, some white with orange patches but bigger than our orange tip, small yellow, larger pale yellow with black wing tips, brown, and one a strident orange with a speckled black pattern. There were loads of bees, some like our honey bees and some dark, almost an inch long, also a couple of dragon flies and a grasshopper of subdued brown which showed bright red when it flew, or was it jumped’ away from my approaching footsteps. Also lizards that mostly moved too fast to photograph. As for the birds, i have so much to learn. I saw a medium sized black bird with a magnificent, trailing orange tail, small finches with black heads, bulbils, something superficially like a large pied wagtail but with a curved beak and distinctive wavy white lines on its black wings, and I heard the squeaky wheelbarrow bird at the top of the mountain. I need a better bird book. And so to the bottom and a walk back through Chilomoni and so to Mitsidi and my temporary home, where I crashed out in my room for a couple of hours doing nothing more strenuous that WhatsApp calling family. Now, there is a difference from last time! So much easier and cheaper to keep in touch with home. It was my turn to cook again so I went to town, made bread rolls and scones, beetroot pasta and tomato and mozzarella salad, avocado with lemon dressing. I shall miss the avocados from the garden.

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.

Friday - This was a red letter day for me because one of my students from last time was coming all the way from the other side of Lilongwe especially to visit me. As a student she was a hard worker and also had excellent relationships both with colleagues and children. After i came home she worked at Mother Teresa for a year or so before moving on to work for another NGO. Currently she is working with the children of refugees, mostly from the Congo. I arranged the afternoon off and went into Beehive in the morning with one target in mind. Circulate the minutes of the CUNIMA meeting, talk to the head of Mary Queen of Peace and get him on side about speeding up the application for affiliation, inform the committee, make an appointment with the registrar etc etc. Having done this I spent an hour or so with the Practice Leader finding out more about how she does her job, and checking up on progress with the dreaded resources room. Then I set off for Mitsidi to spend an afternoon with my ex-student. Sadly I had been home only about half an hour when I received a message to say the bus had broken down the far side of Lungu and she was stranded, waiting for a replacement bus. To cut a long story short she arrived about 5.30pm and to my astonishment she had two little children with her. I had no idea she had children, both boys, one nearly 4 and one 8 months. The poor woman had been travelling all day and was exhausted and hungry. She had only half an hour before she had to leave for a relative’s home and get the children to bed. She was so happy to see me, and I her. She was smiling all over her face and I was not far from tears, she was so positive about what the Beehive Training had done for her and grateful to David and to me. We made an arrangement to meet again in the morning and I cannot wait.

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.

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!!