Progress of our intermediate child care course

We are moving towards the end of the first of two 9-week terms of the Beehive Intermediate Child Care Diploma course. It has been hard work for the students and also for me and for David. Every lecture, discussion and activity is new material that has to be planned carefully as we are aware of the need to make sure that the input is suitable for Malawi and not just regurgitation of input we may have used for similar situations at home in the UK. We will be much better qualified to do the job by the time we reach the end of it than we were when we arrived nearly six months ago. Sometimes it feels as though we have only just started the task of teaching our students and sometimes I feel as though I have known them for years. I just start to get complacent and then something occurs that shows me I know next to nothing! For example the time when we got the students to look at all the milestones of the Malawian ECD syllabus in the Social and Emotional, and Moral and Spiritual Domains and group them into 'Social', 'Emotional', 'Moral' and 'Spiritual' milestones. It had never occurred to me that anyone would think that gender identity with respect to little children was a moral issue, but to my astonishment when I applied my own criterion that if more than half the class agreed a particular milestone went into a particular group it would have to go there, that is where gender identity went. There were other issues where the class was unable to reach a majority view, but not this one. I was definitely overruled and women felt as strongly about it as men.

For the last four weeks the students have been taking it in turns to start sessions by presenting their story sacks. The whole project has been of rather mixed success. Firstly they seemed to choose what I considered to be rather odd and sometimes dull books. There are far too many reading scheme books among the second hand selections that we receive regularly from donors in the UK. I do not wish to seem ungrateful, but if I may generalize, reading schemes are not the best stories I have ever read! The students seem to like them however, perhaps it is because they are designed for children whose reading is in the early stages and thus the language is simpler and Chichewa speakers find it more easily comprehensible. Some of these 'easy readers' use traditional English stories such as 'The Three Billy Goats Gruff' and 'The Little Red Hen'. These I found better. The students have really excelled at making the bags to hold the items to help the children to understand and enjoy the story. I bought some cheap, bright, traditional, African printed cotton and also collected some second hand material and tailor's scraps. Some of the bags are beautiful with homemade strings and fringing made out of odds and ends of wool that I begged from the knitting project. They took seriously my suggestion that children should be able immediately to identify which bag was for which story by what was on the outside of the bag and we have had some interesting appliqués. The local material met with a mixed reception. One girl was absolutely horrified that we were going to cut up decent chitenje lengths and use them for toys for children. She gave me quite a hard time about it. She felt it was definitely not right when there were many people who needed such things to wear. I asked her if the children did not deserve also to have good quality materials from which to learn, but she did not seem very impressed with that as an argument! I put together a presentation about making story sacks and had a go at making one myself as a demonstration model, but in retrospect I do not think I made enough or gave it as much thought as I should have. I talked about collecting relevant household items and I provided a lot of soft toys to be used as characters from the stories. I also drew a few things and characters that I could not find suitable items to represent and then laminated them to make them more durable. I think the technology involved appealed to the students because almost all used laminated characters and props. Many simply reproduced the pictures in the book, rather than providing additional items for the children to use imaginatively to play with and to develop the ideas in the story. I tried to explain about the play value of having a little character that you could use to reenact the story, rather than having pictures where the character is only seen doing one thing, but I am not at all sure that everyone understood. Some of the presentations were a bit labored, instead of simply telling the story and illustrating it with the props they had collected together many groups spent ages telling us what the story was going to be about and then told the story, simply holding up the items, but not really using them in an imaginative way. I often think they would be much better presenting this kind of work in Chichewa, and indeed sometimes we do encourage them to tell stories in Chichewa, but the disadvantage is that we do not understand more than the odd word. Even those with very good English tend to sound a bit stilted in English, but in Chichewa, they are more animated and the words are more fluid and expressive. I am sure that this is the way to go. Malawian children are more or less brought up to be bilingual. All secondary and a good proportion of primary education is in English, but with little ones there is great value in telling stories and rhymes in the first language so I don't think that we should encourage the children to speak English all the time but make use of the fact that all the staff are bilingual. In the baby room most of the communication should be in Chichewa and the amount of English gradually increased as the children move up through the age groups.

We have had a week looking at working with Babies, a week on Toddlers and next week we shall be looking at children aged 3-6 years. We are trying to familiarize our students (and ourselves) with the Malawian ECD (Early Childhood Development) Curriculum. You would think this would be easy, order 70 copies, hand them out and encourage them to read it; job done! Ha! In Malawi nothing is so simple. I began by approaching the local Social Services department, part of whose brief is to inspect early years provision, presumably ensuring that they are teaching the right things. It took three visits and several phone calls before eventually I received one copy. I have been to Lilongwe (four hours drive away) and visited both the Ministry of Gender and Unicef, who worked together to produce the document, but it is out of print and unobtainable. Eventually I decided that it would be quicker to retype the whole thing, so David and I have done this between us. It was a good way of getting to grips with the content but was rather laborious. David was a star, and did the two largest Domains, Physical Development and Mental and Cognitive Development. Every time I saw him for about two weeks he seemed to be madly typing and alternately tearing out his hair in frustration and laughing hysterically at the explanation column which attempts to tell the care giver the reasons behind the choice of the milestones but does not always quite make it. The phrase 'this is a wonderful way to…' appears many times. If I ever write a book about Early Years Education in Malawi I think I shall have to call it 'The Wonderful Way'! Even though I had the two smaller domains, Social and Emotional, and Moral and Spiritual, I finished my typing considerably after David did, largely because I tried to supplement it with extra ideas of activities and far more extensive resources lists than appear in the original. I did my usual trick of using a different colour type for the Pearson additions, so that the original document is the black type and my embellishments are purple. I still need to do the Social and Emotional purple bits and eventually also the other two Domains as well, but it is a bit of a long term project and perhaps my dissertation should take priority!

We have also had a week on nutrition, and a week on hygiene, sanitation, water and infection control. I brought in Chaliza to help with nutrition Malawi-style and one of our students who has worked as a Health Education Field Worker to talk about food hygiene and hand-washing. People are cooking and eating in such different ways here from the ways we do in the UK that it would have been difficult for me and David to present these subjects with any credibility. I have certainly learned a lot about Malawian fruits and vegetables and a whole new way of classifying food into six groups that works really well to help people make a properly balanced diet out of locally available foods. The groups are: Staple Foods, Animal Foods, Fruits, Vegetables, Legumes and Nuts, and Fats and Oils. It works well. As a little aside, some of you may be interested to know the effect that a transfer to a more or less Malawian diet had had on me. I have not been restricting my food intake at all, but in the six-months I have been here have lost 3 stone. I suppose my lifestyle is a bit more active here than it was at home, but not hugely so. I am not exactly sylph-like yet, but am nearer to it than I was!

At home discussion of infection control focuses on other diseases, our Health Worker concentrated upon cholera, typhoid and dysentery. I have learned the two-cup technique for drinking water, which involves using one cup to dip into the water bucket and pour into a second cup to drink from, to avoid redipping a cup that has been used for drinking and thus contaminating the water store. We have also practiced a thorough handwashing technique that uses very little water and avoids sharing the water and thus acquiring infection from previous washers, all very clever, and not things we need to think about in England with piped water in every home and plenty of rainfall all year round.

And so we are approaching the Easter holiday. Almost half way through the theoretical part of the course already! Time seems to have gone so fast since we began the course. The Children's Centre is continuing to grow. We watch it getting bigger from our vantage point on the steps of the classroom which is further up the hill. The building schedule has slipped in true Malawian style and it will definitely not be finished in July as per the original plan, but if we are lucky the south, day care building will be done by September in time for the start of the next academic year. George is working hard to recruit room leaders to work in the Children's Centre and manage teams of our students working as care givers and gaining practical experience to complete their Diploma training. Anyone who fancies six months in Malawi with a bunch of enthusiastic but inexperienced staff launching the Beehive Children's Centre in to the community in Chilomoni should talk to George. I can't promise it will be easy, but it will certainly be interesting and a challenge. Also I can promise fun, at least some of the time, and the weather is good! Just fancy, by the time I come home I shall have missed two British winters!

A trip to Zomba and an explanation

Last Sunday we decided to go and have a look at Chingwe's Hole, an apparently bottomless pit, which is actually about 60 metres deep, up in the mountains of Zomba Plateau. As the roads are notoriously bad on the plateau we decided to take the Land Rover despite the fact that travelers in the back were likely to be well shaken up by the time we arrived. Malcolm had been studying the map, not a great map as it turned out, but then I have yet to find a good detailed map of Malawi! We reckon that the best thing to do is to install a computer in the Land Rover and use Google Earth, but as yet we have not developed the technology! Malcolm identified a road on the map, which claimed to be a main road, which would provide an alternative route to Zomba that was not a great deal further than the usual way. The obvious road is narrow and bumpy, but is at least tarmacked, and it takes about an hour and twenty minutes to get to Zomba. David, who has been on such trips before, arrived at the Land Rover with the cushions from the easy chairs in his house and settled himself on top of the spare wheel with cushions underneath and behind him. Malcolm drove, Philip and Sharon perched on the bench seats in the back and I had first shift in the comfort of the front seat! On the way we passed an extraordinary, football shaped house on the main road out of Blantyre towards Lilongwe. Philip explained that when he was in Malawi twenty years ago he had known the guy who owns this house and that he had tried to contact him recently but been unable to.

The first challenge was to identify the turn off for the back way to Zomba. The map showed a turn to the right in a village called xxxx. We found xxxx alright and there were two potential candidates for the right road. There was a police barrier close to one of them and after a brief debate on the wisdom of initiating contact with the police in case they found something wrong with the Land Rover and fined us, we asked the way and were directed down a narrow dirt track that would have been more like the approach to a run-down hill farm in England than anything else! The trip was reminiscent of the drive down the right hand turn from the bottom of the drive that ended up at the airport, in that the road got narrower and less smooth as we went along. On the map it was a firm brown line with only two turns marked, but there were several turns to left and right and at some unknown point we must have taken the wrong one. The drive was beautiful and fascinating. The mountains grew gradually nearer so we knew we were not going in completely the wrong direction, but something was not right, we knew from the map that we should be approaching Chingale, but although we passed many collections of houses we did not encounter anywhere that was large enough to merit a mention on our map. It was surprising how the condition of the maize growing in fields quite close to one another varied, it looked as though some had had enough water and other patches, not enough at all. Harvest time is only a couple of weeks away. There has not been a great deal of rain in recent weeks, some steady drizzle occasionally, but no real downpours. Apparently this is unusual and the crops are missing the water. We saw many plots of cotton in flower, some tobacco, endless maize interspersed with vegetables, pumpkins which are grown for their leaves as well as the fruits. There were bridges and culverts over rivers and streams, but some of the beds were dry. The mountains were beautiful, misty blue in the distance and vivid and lush green as we approached, the higher we got, the more water and the better looking the crops. Eventually we asked a series of people where we were and at last found someone who was able to tell us not only that we were on the Liwonde road, which was not at all the direction in which we wanted to go, but also that we needed to retrace our steps a couple of kilometres and turn left for Chingale. So now we were on a road that did not appear anywhere on the map and in places the maize touched both sides of the Land Rover. David complained to Malcolm that he had been promised views and all he could see was foliage! A couple of hours after turning off we finally arrived at a trading centre with signs that indicated we were in Chingale. Hoorah! -Two thirds of the way along the brown line on the map. It was not long before we lost the way again and soon Sharon was exercising her rusty Chichewa of twenty years ago to try to get us on the Zomba road. Eventually we found it, more by luck than judgment I fear, and climbed, higher and higher. We stopped at one point to look at the view. It was a bright sunny day, with just a little haze softening the focus of the view, but we could see for miles, a vast panorama of flat plain with the silver ribbon of the Shire river rippling across the middle and Lake Malombe clearly visible just below the blend of blue and grey where distant mountains met the sky the other side of the plain. When we got properly into the mountains there were uncultivated areas with wild flowers in abundance and I saw several butterflies in various sizes and colours, and many birds including the vermillion and flame flashes of Yellow and Red Bishops. Also a black bird with a long trailing tail that Sharon thought was a bee-eater, but I can't find it in the book. Some kind of widow perhaps? It was in silhouette and I couldn't tell if it was all black or not. The Zomba end of the brown line on the map is probably the most beautiful road along which I have driven since I arrived in Malawi. By this time I was in the back of the Land Rover and could look out of the back window over the way we had come. Our first stop in Zomba was the supermarket for cold drinks and then we turned the Land Rover's bonnet so it was pointing upwards again and started up to the plateau. We turned to the left at the track which forms a wriggly ring road round the plateau.

 

I wrote the beginning of this entry about a month ago, and because it was not finished I did not publish it. Why have I not written for a month following being such a regular blogger? I am not sure. I think there is not a single important reason, but more a series of small reasons that have added up to inaction. I have certainly been very busy. I think George's original estimate that the development of the course would need three trainers was probably pretty accurate. David and I are doing a pretty good job but we are preparing new material for every session and actually teaching for 26 hours a week, so this adds up to a lot of time spent over a hot computer putting new Power Point presentations together. Certainly my knowledge of the technology has improved no end in the five months I have been here! Spending my evenings at the computer as well has become a less attractive option of late. This is partly because there are more folk at Mitsidi and consequently social life is more varied and I have spent more time just being at Mitsidi in the company of others. We play quite a bit of Scrabble and the standard suits me! I am able to win some of the time, but there are others who can beat me frequently, so there is enough challenge to keep me interested. Karl and I used to play a lot of Scrabble while he was in hospital and I think I only beat him on three occasions, certainly not often enough to prevent me from becoming discouraged! We all go to the Liquor Garden now and then and this is good because it means socializing with Malawians, although respectable Malawian women are not seen there. I seem to get away with it as an azungu. We have been out for a few meals including a memorable evening at an Ethiopian café where we ate a selection of dishes with Ethiopian, rolled flatbread, which was different and interesting. The couple who ran the place made a selection of dishes for us to try and really went out of their way to make us welcome. Next week it is my birthday and I get to choose where we go. I can't make up my mind. We have finally managed to sort out how to use the big screen in the living room at Mitsidi in conjunction with a laptop to show films and for the last two Fridays have had sociable cinema evenings. Most weekends we go somewhere on at least one of the days, although I find that if I am to get through the week's work without too much panic I have to spend at least part of the other day in preparation for teaching. Last weekend I went to the Mount Soche with Vince and his children, Amanda, who is a nurse working with VSO in Ntcheu, and a couple of medical friends of hers who work in Blantyre at Queen's Hospital. It was good to meet Amanda, with whom I have exchanged the odd email. I liked her very much and it was good to have a like-minded woman of about my own age to talk to. I hope to visit her in Ntcheu on my way to Lilongwe to collect Rose and Joe in a couple of week's time. I am getting very excited about their visit. Already it seems a long time since Jack was here and it will be lovely to have my children with me. When they return home it will only be about six weeks to my own trip to UK on 25 May. So much to do before then! I have hardly touched my dissertation since Christmas and Plan A is to have a draft done to discuss with my supervisor by then….

 

 

 

Perhaps I should briefly finish the tale of the trip to Chingwe's Hole. It seems a long time ago now! We did find it, and it was impressive. What at first appears to be a small clump of trees adjacent to the most amazing misty blue view of the Shire valley, turns out to be a deep hole maybe three metres across, with trees and vegetation clinging to the almost vertical sides and deep darkness in the middle with no prospect of seeing the bottom. The guides at the top told us that it is about 60 metres deep and that there must be some way out although they were not clear about exactly what. Apparently lepers used to be thrown down there. I understand that Chingwe means something like rope and that it got its name because no one wanted to touch the lepers to throw them down so they used to twist ropes around them and throw them in touching the ropes only. Apparently there is a place near the bottom called 'Dead body village' where bodies and bits of bodies used to turn up with great regularity. Most unpleasant!

While we were inspecting the hole we saw that there was a couple sitting on a bench quietly enjoying the magnificent view; a white man of maybe 60 and a younger Malawian woman. The guide took us down a steep twisty path a few hundred metres to see what he described as 'the gorge', a spectacular rock formation which you could easily miss if you did not know it was there. I realized that the couple from the bench had joined our party and were talking animatedly to Phillip. It turned out that this was the man that he had been talking about earlier who owned the 'football' house. Talk about a coincidence!

Where else have I been since I last wrote up the blog? I have been up the 'Way of the Rosary' again one Sunday afternoon. I think this is definitely the most beautiful local walk, and another weekend I went with Malcolm to Michuri Nature Reserve again, but we didn't see much in the way of wild-life. We have had shopping trips to Blantyre. I have continued to develop a relationship with Joseph, a street vendor who sells souvenirs and craft items to azungus. He now knows that if I say I am not buying today I really mean it, and leaves me alone. When I do want to buy I fondly imagine that he charges me a reasonable price! A couple of weeks ago I treated myself to a lovely malachite necklace. Now what I need (?) is earrings to match! We spend an hour or so most Saturdays in the garden of the Mount Soche hotel over mzuzu coffee and cake. Last weekend Malcolm, Melvin (the new engineer) and I went to Mulange and climbed up to the waterfall again, the same walk that I did with Jack and Mary a couple of months ago. We set off in the Land Rover to find the Fort Lister Pass but unfortunately did not find it until about 4.00pm which was too late to ensure getting down again before dark, so that remains a trip for a future occasion. Maybe later this weekend I shall get around to bringing you up to date on the development of the course, maybe you will have to wait longer! This afternoon we are off to the Kamuzu stadium to watch Malawi play Togo. International football at K200 a ticket! (less than a pound!).

I'll try not to take a whole month 'til my next entry! If you want to encourage me, comment!

News of work and leisure

We are nearing the end of the third week of the new courses. We have worked really hard at learning the student's names and I am pretty confident not only that I know them all, but that I can pronounce them correctly and even spell most of them! During the first and second weeks we played a lot of name games and it has really paid off. I did a session on learning styles and multiple intelligences hoping that each student would find out about their own preferred learning styles and apply that knowledge to the way in which they approach their own learning. At the end we played the game where you introduce yourself using any alliterative adjective and at the same time step forward and do an action, thus giving, visual, auditory and kinaesthetic cues to help all types of learner to remember the names. The second person in the circle has to introduce themselves and then the first person, and so on, so that the introductions build up into a long string, until the last person has to introduce the whole class. It proved to be a hilarious process; it took a while before everyone worked out what alliteration was, although I thought I had explained it! We got through Marvelous Marian, Drinking Dave, Awesome Aida, which somehow got transposed into Osama Aida (?) and several others until suddenly we got Lovely Gloria! Jingle Jangle Jerman caused a laugh. One of the most serious members of the group will forever be remembered as Bouncing Blazio, particularly as Mother Maureen insisted on calling him Bouncing Baby Blazio! All went well until we reached Ruth who introduced herself as Raughable Ruth. Many Malawians are not able to distinguish between 'r' and 'l' and apart from me and David who became quite overcome with giggles, there were only a few people who could understand why we were laughing. The 'l' and 'r' confusion led to some amusement in the exam papers too. We had children frying kites and learning to skip with a lop! Also the rather delightful 'They were in a circle crapping hands!' and 'Abuse means inflingement or violation of one's rights!' My personal favourite is 'If something is long as a Care Giver I am not supposed to tell anyone but the supervisor.' There were a few other amusing errors in the exam papers, such as: 'My responsibility as a Care Giver be that if I suspect that the child in my care was being abused, is my duty to ask the children at light place on what was happened to him then I will comfort him, then telling their friends that they should love one another.' I never did quite work out what was intended there. There were one or two classic definitions of play: 'Play is any activity that involves muscles' and 'A play is any activity which makes somebody be happy, sad etc'. But, I digress!

The student's first homework was to research one of the pioneers of practical approaches to early years education that influence our work with young children today. We had presentations on Froebel, Montessori, Steiner, Malaguzzi and Weikart. The presentations varied from execrable to reasonably competent! They do not really seem to know how to work in groups. Perhaps the Malawian education system does not lend itself to preparing young people to work together. With classes in primary school including anything up to 200 children per teacher I am constantly surprised that children learn anything at all, apart from how to survive in a crowd! Most groups either nominated one of the better English speakers to present the whole thing or took it in turns to read brief paragraphs. In the latter case there was no apparent preparation and students stumbled over words that had obviously been written by other members of the group. I suppose we shall all learn as we go along.

We are putting a lot of emphasis on the importance of observation in work with young children and so following a lecture by David we asked them to observe a child playing for five minutes for the second week's homework. There were some interesting pieces of work, but I was struck as I walked round the class reading them while the students were discussing them, by how few had read the question properly, so I asked the whole class to stand up. The homework instruction was: 'Write up and present to the class a five-minute observation of a child aged six years or less, playing. First I asked to sit down all those who had not written anything down, then those who had observed for less or more than five minutes, then those who had written about more than one child, and then those who has observed children doing anything other than playing. I was left with five students standing. These I said to the class, were the ones who had done the homework that had been set!

We have now begun work on a series of sessions on play and a child-centred approach to learning. I am not sure exactly why but it has felt like a hard week. In some ways it has also been a very interesting week. We had a speaker from the Association of Pre-school Playgroups of Malawi on making toys and play materials from locally available materials at a cost of next to nothing. The students spent a happy afternoon making things from clay, macerating leaves and flowers to make paint, and making toys from packets, plastic bottles etc and also from fabric scraps left over by the tailor. Despite having to send my decent camera home with Jack for repair as it decided to behave very oddly after falling out of my handbag in the bag of the Land Rover and being severely shaken, I managed to take some nice pictures of the things they made.

One morning we split the class into three groups and borrowed 30 children from Standard 1 (5-6 year olds) and did a carousel programme involving parachute games with me, songs with Lindy and making paper aeroplanes with David. This is the first time we have seen the students with children and in some cases it was quite illuminating. It was not always the ones I expected to have a good manner with the children that actually demonstrated it. Children are viewed very differently in Malawi from the way they are at home and I am still learning about local approaches. In some ways our brief is to encourage a new approach to children for Malawi and of course we cannot do this in a day. Sometimes I worry that we should not be trying to make cultural changes and on other days I am certain that we should.

We have continued to work on observation and planning but I think that the students find it all very hard to understand. It is a short-coming of the course that they will have no opportunity for working on placements with young children and thus putting into practice what they are learning before the Children's Centre opens in September. As well as because it is far too much work for me and David to organize without further help, we decided against it because we are teaching such a different way of working from the rote learning approach that is so common it would not help the students to develop good practice to say the very least. There are several expensive, private nurseries that would probably be very good, but many, many local settings with up to 50 children per staff member and very little understanding of the importance of either play or sound relationships with key adults.

I have tried to explain what a story sack is to the students and how they are designed to encourage reading and language development. Everyone has embarked enthusiastically to make their own, but they tend to be in a great hurry and I am not sure how polished or how durable they will be, but I am looking forward to seeing what they produce. I have taken a few photos of story sacks in the making and some look quite promising. I explained the process of collecting items together to help in the telling and re enaction of the story and to support further learning about subjects raised in the story. I recommended that they start with a story book and build the rest of the sack around that. I was surprised by how many of the students were apparently unable to tell which books are stories and which non-fiction. I suppose it is simply that they have had very little access to books at all other than shared school text books. Lindy, who has been teaching English to primary school children from the standard textbook for the Malawian curriculum does not have a high opinion of the quality of the stories recommended to teach aspects of English. Perhaps it is even better an idea than I originally thought that we continue to start every day with a story. David and I are still reading these at present, but soon I plan to hand the responsibility over to the students so that they get used to reading aloud.

Next week we continue with the same theme and will have time to finish the story sacks, and think about how we can encourage play and exploration by the way we set up both indoor and outdoor spaces for learning. We shall also be looking at creativity and recording children's 'learning journeys', so lots to cover in couple of days!

What have I been doing apart from work in the couple of weeks since Jack went home? Well, Friday night in the Liquor Garden seems to be becoming a bit of an institution. David goes straight from work and plays Pool in the Drinking Den while I go home and have a swim and some dinner. Malcolm, who pops into the site to see the night shift, drops me off at the Liquor Garden on his way and then comes in for one or three when he is done at work.

Last Sunday Malcolm and I took the Land Rover and explored where the dirt road goes at the bottom of our drive if you turn right, instead of left which goes to Blantyre. I have been here nearly five months, and never been that way. The road was rough but the country was beautiful. I think I have previously described the view as one approaches the turn to Mitsidi where one comes over the brow of a hill and the mountains are ranged in front of you, each one appearing less green and more blue as they get further away. We were driving into that view and it was a clear sunny day. Even though as rainy seasons go this has been rather a dry one, everything is vividly green at the moment. The maize will be harvested in another couple of weeks and it is now way above my head. In between the maize plants pumpkin leaves and beans make sure that very little red earth is exposed and everywhere looks quite lush. There were wild flowers in the verges in abundance including quantities of large deep pink, daisy-like flowers that I had not noticed before. The road got narrower and narrower and more and more bumpy, at one point the maize was almost touching the Land Rover on both sides. We were never far from habitation though. Just as you began to think that you might be leaving civilization behind, another village or group of houses would appear, or a gaggle of children run out between the trees to wave at the Land Rover. It was not possible to go far without passing people carrying buckets of water or sacks of maize on their heads and what can be carried on a bicycle sometimes has to be seen to be believed: huge bundles of firewood or charcoal, all manner of produce on the way to market, sometimes whole families balanced on crossbar and carrier. Once I saw a man on a bike with no less than six chair frames in a huge fan behind him. The chairs had no seats, but nonetheless it was an impressive feat. We crossed a small river on a bridge that was under repair. Malcolm got out and cast his engineer's eye over it and pronounced it passable, but I was still a bit anxious until we were safely on the other side. We picked up a family of father, mother and little lad of about four years old, all in their best clothes, walking along apparently in the middle of nowhere on the dusty track. She looked stunning in royal blue, with almost impossible high heels and father and son wore pinstriped suits with sleeveless jackets and bright shirts. They were off to an important football match about three villages along the road. It was a good thing that we gave them a ride because when we got there the match was under way and I think it would have taken them at least an hour to walk, especially the mother in those shoes. The little boy asked his father if Malcolm was the preacher, but I said 'No, he is the engineer!' and that seemed to satisfy him. Eventually after about an hour and a half we came out a few hundred yards from Chileka airport, the other side of Blantyre. The road had led us along the back of a ridge of mountains and we were able to get back to Blantyre on tarmac in about half an hour. It was quite an adventure!

We have had a few idle Saturday mornings pottering about the shops and markets in Blantyre and indulging our taste for Mzuzu coffee in the Mount Soche Hotel, definitely an azungu extravagance! Mitsidi is filling up again. Jan, Lindy, Malcolm, David and I have been joined by Philip and Sharon an American couple who were in Malawi 20 years ago with the Peace Corps and are here for three months doing some work with the Bishop. I have not yet discovered exactly what, although I do know that Sharon's role is to do with 'spiritual direction'. I look forward to finding out more about that. Today Jonathan and Richard arrived for a couple of weeks. They are computer people and are going to set up the network for the IT Training College. I'm not a hundred percent clear what that involves either! In the next few weeks we get a JCB expert, another engineer and an architect, so that should liven up the place considerably!

Tomorrow at least five of us are off to Zomba plateau to have a look at Chingwe's hole, an allegedly bottomless pit down which enemies used to be thrown according to the guidebook!

Real life/Holiday balance!

Welcome to Malawi in the rainy season! I am sitting on the khonde of my room at the Dedza Pottery Lodge. The sky is cloudy but before that there was bright sunshine and before that as I was driving back towards Blantyre from dropping Jack at Lilongwe airport, it was absolutely chucking it down to the extent that I almost pulled in to the side of the road to wait for it to stop despite functional 3-speed windscreen wipers. Since I was following a vivid yellow car driven very sedately, I contented myself with keeping it a respectable distance in front, but it was at that time that I decided that I would stay at Dedza tonight according to my original plan rather than drive all the way home in one go as I had thought about doing when my appointment at UNICEF lasted only five minutes as they had failed to get copies of the documents promised a fortnight ago. They asked when I would next be in Lilongwe, but I don't expect to come again until Rose and Joe come to visit me in April, so we have agreed that someone will bring them to me in Blantyre when they arrive from the printer.

I think it is good that I have this afternoon as a sort of transitional period between being an mzungu on holiday with Jack and a volunteer teaching in Chilomoni. Between the two of us I think Jack and I have spent almost as much money as I have got through in the four months I have been in Malawi, during the last two weeks, but we have certainly had a great holiday. I will not record it in too much detail as I know he is going to write about it himself, but we have stayed in a lodge on the beach at Nkhotakota, had an astonishing 24 hours in Liwonde National Park on safari, swum in a pool 68 metres deep at the foot of a waterfall at Mulange, seen a colourful slice of life in the Liquor Garden in Chilomoni and walked, talked, explored, pottered, swum in Mitsidi pool and generally enjoyed each other's company. Of course I am sad today that he has gone but I know that despite a good holiday he is ready to go back to his real life at home. I guess that life in Malawi is real life to me at the moment, but it does not always feel like it and there is a part of me that wanted to check in with him and his fragile luggage, (no doubt he will tell you about that!) and go back to family and friends. However this visit has taught me that it really is true that my family members are only 24 hours away, and it is only two months until Rose and Joe are scheduled to come and see me, so I do not feel isolated in the way that I did at Christmas. This visit has also reinforced my awareness that what David and I are doing here is useful, as so many people have explained to Jack what we are doing and how much they appreciate it, that I cannot help but feel positive about the project. It also helps that on Monday morning before we left to start Jack's long journey home, I taught the first session of our Intermediate Child Care course. It was so good to see the students again and be reminded of their enthusiasm and hope for the future. As everyone arrived we recalled how quiet they had been at the beginning of the Introductory Course when no one knew each other, it was very much like that again as we have classes that are made up of students from all four of the original groups of thirty who took the Introductory courses. I threw all my carefully laid plans to the wind temporarily and got them to make name cards again, partly to remind myself who everyone is, but mostly to give them a task that would involve them getting up and moving around the room to collect materials and get them chatting to each other. It helped a bit, but they were still on the quiet side, I suppose that is to be expected. We have responded to their request for more handouts and agreed a budget with Peter and Vince. The first handout was a brief course outline with the main subjects to be covered each week and the homework to prepare for the following week, so there can be no excuses for not knowing what the homework is, they have all had it in print!! I went through the course outline and explained why we have put it together in the way that we have. Then we went outside and played a lot of name games, so that by the end of the session I really did feel that I knew the name of every student in the group again. I daresay I shall still make a few mistakes, and as David said, 'It is OK until the girls change their hairstyles or come in wearing their wigs!'

We got the class to divide themselves into five groups and then spent nearly an hour and a half reviewing the introductory course under the headings, 'Memories', 'Gains', and 'Difficulties'. We had planned that the memories would be fairly light hearted, David's abiding memory will be of Ruth and Gilbert struggling to pass a balloon between their knees in a team game, and I will not forget the laughter provoked by a session exploring children's books for those which taught early key concepts, I have no idea what set the group to laughing but my photo shows shared pleasure that is a joy to see. However the students' responses to the question, 'What are your strongest memories?' tended towards the serious and included; games, artwork, child development lectures, and most surprisingly to me 'Bowlby's Theory of Attachment'! This last especially in view of the fact that some of the answers in the exam revealed that some students had very little understanding of what I thought I had taught! David remarked that probably those were the ones who are no longer on the course, I certainly hope so!! The 'Gains' were encouraging and included quite a few stories of how applying the theory we had taught to their dealings with children in their own families had led to improved relationships and less discord, which was good to hear. 'Difficulties' were of course harder to deal with and I was a bit shocked to hear one person say that there had been some feeling that tutors had shown preferences to 'favourites' in the class and that this had led to some people failing to try their best. I would like to follow this up because of course I do not want this kind of misunderstanding to happen. I wish I had some idea of who was involved here, but I really cannot think. I have encouraged the class to come and talk to us if similar situations occur in the future. David wondered if this could be due in some way to cultural differences, but I am not sure how. Looking back I guess I should have got them to consider 'Difficulties' before 'Gains' and thus ended on a higher note than we did. This is rather a classic error that I should have avoided, but upon the whole the first session went well and I am actually very pleased that the students felt able to raise such a problem. Other difficulties included more predictable subjects such as minibus fares, hours for the course, and the length of time given for the exam. It is never possible to please all the people all of the time and over these issues I am confident that we have done the best that we can. I am afraid that we may lose one or two people over the bus fares problem, but we really do not have access to any funds to help with this through Beehive. The only way is to arrange individual sponsors for individual students who are struggling, so if anyone would be interested in helping in this way it will cost about K720 a week for 19 weeks for those who take two minibuses in each direction, a total of about £56. This does not seem a lot, but if you put it in the context of the wages here, it is a lot of money. The laborers on our building site get about K5000 a month and a primary school teacher about K15000.

It is over an hour since I began to write and the weather has changed again, there is a steady gentle rain and the temperature has dropped by several degrees. I love that smell you get when rain falls on hot ground, it is the same in Malawi as it is in England, but somehow more intense. In all the weeks I have been here the only times I have felt chilly have been when I have been in Dedza. I think that it must have its own microclimate. It is quite high here I am sure, there are mountains all around, but in Blantyre where I live we are at about 1000m above sea level which is comparable to living on the top of Snowden, so I do not imagine it is much higher here. Thank Goodness I do not live at sea level where it is perhaps ten degrees hotter!

Unicef and the Ministry

The drive from Ntcheu to Lilongwe took at least a couple of hours. We just had time to book into the Korea Garden Lodge before we had to jump in the Land Rover and speed off to the Ministry of Gender, Children and Community Affairs where we met with The Director, whose name is Hyacinth, but I didn't catch her surname; Francis Chalamander, Dr Foster Kholowa and an administrator who was called, I think, Immaculate. We were welcomed and ushered in to the Director's Office where we sat down in a circle of chairs. Francis Chalamander chaired the meeting. I asked them to tell us about ECD in Malawi, but clearly this was not considered to be the business of the meeting and we had to explain what Beehive is doing in Chilomoni and what our course involves. They seemed concerned that we were wanting accreditation of some sort for a course that has already begun, and also raised concerns about the sustainability of the course given that David and I only plan to be in Malawi long enough to see our current group of students through to the end of the third, practical part of our course. This seems an entirely reasonable comment to me. As far as I know no decisions have been made about whether the course will be repeated after the first students have graduated and are working in the Children's Centre. I probably would not accredit a course myself without more concrete plans for the future. A copy of our draft curriculum was handed round and accepted rather grudgingly as an outline that was OK but far more detail will be required and they did not retain the copy that we offered them for their records. They did however comment that it did appear to cover most aspects that they consider to be essential, so that at least is a start. To get government accreditation for the course it will be necessary for us to jump through a number of bureaucratic hoops, such as to be registered as an NGO, and also to be associated with an educational institution and although all this may well happen with time I think it is likely that this first set of students will have to be satisfied with a Beehive Diploma, rather than one which is nationally, let alone internationally recognized. Dr Kholowa was pretty quiet during the meeting, but appeared quite positive and I think it would be good to go and see him at Chancellor College, in Zomba, find out more about the future plans for the course that is happening there and perhaps explore ways of working cooperatively with him. We will need to talk to Vince about the various registration and inspection procedures necessary. It was a pity he did not come with us to the meeting. We were not really aware of the dealings Beehive has had with the Ministry in the past and this knowledge would have been useful. One thing that was clear was that we shall have to work closely with Dominic Misomali who is head of Social Services in Blantyre and this is no problem, we have kept him informed of what is going on and David has visited him since our return and reported on our visit to Lilongwe. I have invited him to speak to the students about Child Protection issues and to come and see the course whenever he is in the area.

The following morning we visited Bruce Parry of UNICEF who was very positive and helped us with some of the UNICEF literature we have had trouble getting hold of. He has also promised to give us the Malawian curriculum for ECD and the Training Manual in electronic versions which will be very useful. I am to go and pick them up next week when I take Jack back to Lilongwe to the airport. He also advised us to register the Children's Centre as a CBCC as this may open up the possibility of funding through UNICEF, which is a useful bit of advice.

Nursery school at Ntcheu

It seems such a long time since I last wrote anything! Indeed it probably is the longest interval ever between posts. However for most of it I have been very busy being on holiday and having a good time. This entry is going to be about the things I did shortly before my son Jack arrived for a visit and then the plan is that he will write about what we have been doing since he arrived. We have had a few days being tourists and now are back in Chilomoni and he is meeting the people I know and getting to know a bit about my life here in Chilomoni.

On Sunday afternoon, ten days ago Vince, Chaliza, David and I set off in a Land Rover to visit the Sacramentine Sisters in Ntcheu who run a nursery school which I have heard variously described as 'Beautiful' and 'The best nursery provision in Malawi', so we thought it would be a good place to go and see. The convent is tucked away behind the BP garage in Ntcheu just off the M1 main road. It is an oasis of calm just behind the busy trading area that is the main street of the town. The nuns have beautiful, solidly built facilities which are a huge contrast to the more typical Malawian buildings which surround it. I imagine they must have had an Italian architect and used lots of imported materials. They have paid a lot of attention to the finish and it is a lovely place to be. We were warmly welcomed by Sister Leonia and Sister Milcha (not sure how you spell this, apologies if it is wrong!). Chaliza and I had a long room with three single beds in it and curtains patterned with 'Bad Rabbit' which seemed a bit anachronistic. David and Vince had a room in another block across the courtyard. Sister Milcha is Kenyan and is in charge of the nursery school. Apparently the Kenyan Government gives a much higher priority to Early Childhood Education than many other African countries. While we waited for the evening service to be over and for the dinner to be ready she told us about the nursery which caters for about 350 local pre-school children. She said it was supposed to be for children from 3 years originally but parents have begged the nuns to take younger children as they feel their little ones will be safer there than at other local provision and now the youngest child is about 15 months. The children arrive from about seven o'clock for an assembly at about seven thirty so we arranged to meet to go down to the school at about five past seven after mass and breakfast. Dinner was taken in the dining room, a long room with three tables, one laden with serving dishes which emanated delicious smells into the atmosphere, one which was filled by a group of novices in blue and white checked dresses and a long one for everyone else including us, seven sisters, a visiting priest who was 'having a holiday' with the sisters and an Italian girl in her early twenties who was an artist staying with the sisters for a few months. Conversation was warm and interested and the food was terrific. There was chicken, pasta, pumpkin leaves cooked with tomatoes and onions, and, Oh Joy! there was a huge dish of leeks and green beans covered with melted cheese. Dessert was fresh fruit, golden bananas and mangoes from the garden.

In the morning the others went to Mass and I had a little wander round the garden. The sisters grow vegetables and maize and cassava as well as many beautiful flowers including a hibiscus with huge orange blooms. There were a few goats penned on the grass under the fruit trees. We all met up for a breakfast of bread and fruit and beautiful espresso coffee brought in specially from Italy. What a lovely treat! Then we walked down the hill to the school. By the time we got there many children were already there and were forming lines outside the building. The boys wore pale blue polo shirts and blue shorts and the girls yellow shirts and blue skirts. For some of the little ones the outfits must have been bought with growth in mind for some of the skirts almost brushed the floor. After a while the teachers began to encourage the children to 'march like a soldier' and the lines of children went into the school marching and chanting 'March like a soldier, march like a soldier' as they went. The entrance hall opened into a big hall and the classes went into their places and sat down in long rows on the floor. Even the tiny ones knew where to go and settled on the floor in more or less straight lines. There were one or two tiny ones who got up and wandered about, but very few. Sister Milcha stayed near the door and greeted latecomers and shepherded them gently towards their classes. Assembly began with songs and brief prayers followed by a succession of activities demonstrated by the teachers and then done by individual children selected by the teachers to come out to the front and show what they could do in front of the whole school. For example the teacher placed large cardboard cut outs of the numbers 1-5 on a low table and asked children to come out and pick out a specific number. I think they must have known the children well as everyone selected was able to get the right answer. The whole school joined in calling 'Well done, well done' while the successful child waggled their hips to the rhythm of the chant and beamed at the whole school. One of the teachers was asked to do the task blind folded, which she did successfully and then one or two of the older children were called up to follow suit.

The assembly lasted for almost an hour. I was astounded that the children sat still for so long. Whether they concentrated sufficiently to get much out of what was going on I am not sure. Certainly the older children were more engaged than the younger ones. After assembly Sister Milcha showed us round the school. The building itself was magnificent and in some ways reminded me of the pre-schools I saw when I visited Reggio Emilia, but the approach to practice was miles away. In all classrooms except the baby room the children were seated at desks in rows and the lesson was conducted from the front of the room by a teacher who relied heavily upon using repetition and learning by rote. If children repeated their lessons well they were given warm praise and the chorus of 'Well done, well done' could e heard from every classroom. Little children stood at the front of the class with their hands on their hips and waggled their bottoms enthusiastically, but did they understand what they had been taught? Were they able to place it within the context of other things they had learned? The answers to these questions I have no way of knowing from such a brief visit. I spent most time in the baby room where one teacher worked hard to keep upwards of twenty babies entertained all by herself. There was a high shelf of toys, well out of the babies' reach. A few children were playing with soft toys and cars. I later found that David had reached the toys down for the children when he was in the room before me. I witnessed one or two tussles over toys, but nothing that could not have been sorted by gentle intervention and bringing a few more items down from the shelf. The teacher was doing a sterling job, singing, chanting, bouncing a ball around. By the end of the day I should think she must have been exhausted and hoarse! In this room the tables were arranged around the edge of the room. The babies were mostly on a carpet in the middle but a good few were under or behind the tables, either playing with a toy or peeping out and watching the teacher or the other children. Many sat quietly for the whole time I was there. I got down on the floor and played 'Round and round the garden,' 'peepo!' and so on to responses ranging from disinterested, to anxious, to enthusiastic, to laughingly responsive.

In one room of three and four year olds some work was neatly displayed on a sort of wire frame on the wall. The children had done their lessons on tiny scraps of paper not unlike lengths of the strips of paper that we sometimes use for making borders for displays in the UK. There was a set of pictures of balls that the children had drawn and coloured. Most were simple attempts at circles which were then coloured in, but some had markings such as you might find on footballs or tennis balls. The work was tiny. With my background in supporting children with special needs I would be giving children of this age sheets of A3 paper, or bigger if I could, but even this relatively rich setting, resources are very limited and must be made to last as long as possible.

Sister showed us some of the exam papers. Even the tiniest children do an exam at the end of term. All the papers we saw were either simply colouring such as the music and movement exam which involved colouring pictures of instruments etc, or employed techniques such as linking similar shapes with a pencil line. David asked how the staff explained to the children what they were supposed to do as they were too young to read the instructions, but the sister did not seem to understand his question.

We saw the children have their cups of porridge at break time. They sat in a beautiful dining room at long tables. They were expected to eat before they were allowed to talk to each other. Sister said that this rule is necessary in order to ensure that every child eats their share. A small side room had a weighing machine. Each child is weighed monthly to ensure that they are growing properly and getting enough to eat.

We saw a small 'sick bay' room which included the only beds we saw on our tour around. Children arrive at about 7.30am and go home about 3.30pm but I saw no facilities for rest. At 9.00am one little boy was fast asleep with his head pillowed on his arms on the desk in front of him while the chanted lesson went on around him.

The teachers spoke gently to the children and were on the whole encouraging and positive but the lessons were dull and repetitive. I did see one group of about ten children make a bid for freedom and run through the dining room door into the garden and climb on to the roundabout when they should have been waiting for their peers to finish their porridge! No one noticed until David pointed out they had gone and then they were gently but firmly returned to where they should be!

I left with such mixed feelings. The provision here is so much better in so many ways than the small nurseries that are the local alternative. The children are well fed and well cared for, the school building is beautiful, but as far as the educational approach goes it is miles away from the way I have been trained to expect and encourage in the UK. In Chilomoni our brief is to train care givers to encourage the development of creative problem solvers who will think for themselves and become new leaders for Malawi, and yet the Ministry of Gender etc is telling us that our training must fit in with 'Things here in Malawi'. But I am getting slightly ahead of myself. I'll tell you about that next time.

Another week flies by!

I don't really know where this week has gone, it has passed quickly, partly I suppose because Monday was a Bank Holiday. David and I are making the most of not being tied to the classroom and of having a car when it is not needed for the shopping for Mitsidi and so have been getting about a bit. The car is actually in a bit of a state so we took it upon ourselves to make a list of what is wrong with it and take it in to Torrent for a service. The thing I have found the most difficult is that the wipers don't work. It rains so hard that one is forced to stop and wait for the rain to ease off or risk hitting something or ending up in the ditch! This was one of the things that was fixed when David picked the car up, but by the time he got it home they had stopped again.

Vince came with me to Chilomoni Police Station to report the loss of my bag and it was quite an experience. It reminded me a bit of Heartbeat only not quite so warm and cosy! The Police Station is a basic brick building with concrete floors and chipped paintwork. The officer on reception sits behind a wooden counter with a flap that lifts up to let you through if he chooses to admit you. It took us a few minutes to explain that we wanted him to make a report of the loss so that if I am caught driving without a licence I can present the report as evidence that I did have one and am in the process of applying for another. I never did expect that they would do anything about trying to recover what I had lost. After a time of fruitless explanation Vince asked if Henry was in, and then we got some action! Henry is the Chief of Police in Chilomoni. Those of you who also read David's blog will have come across him before as he drinks in the Liquor Garden and was the cause of David being brought home in a police van at dead of night a little while ago, but that is another story! Beehive built a victim support unit for Chilomoni Police last year and apparently it is very well used and makes a significant difference to the conditions in which victims of violence and abuse have to talk about what has happened to them. There is a bedroom, where victims can stay safely if necessary and two small private interview rooms. Previously victims had to be interviewed in the same room as everyone else with no privacy at all. Vince and I went round the back to say 'Hello' to Henry, and while I was there I invited him to come and speak to my students about working cooperatively with the Police, particularly with respect to Child Protection issues. We had a little chat and caught up on how the Victim Support Centre is being used and then were shown to the Interview room where a smiling young policeman was waiting to fill in a form with me, and a woman detective was interviewing a lad who had been apprehended inside someone else's house, but was busy denying it! The room was very small. There was a table, a bench, shared by the lad and the policeman, and three chairs, occupied by Mabel, the detective, Vince and me. Any cat you tried to swing would have been well battered! I handed over K500 on request and the deed was done. I did well, when Claudie did the same thing it cost her K2000. The document clearly carries some clout because I have already produced it when they wanted my passport no. before they would give me my old phone no. back when I went to the Zain shop. I waved the police report and everything went smoothly, even though passport is not one of the listed documents. It might have been, but it was at the immigration office renewing my visa at the time!

On Wednesday morning we visited St Andrew's International School. It has probably the best Early Years provision in Malawi and I have arranged to go and spend a day with them in the near future to find out about their planning and record keeping and run my draft curriculum past the Head of Nursery to get another perspective on whether I have included the right things for Malawi. The school is fee paying and exclusive, but it was just the sort of place you'd want your children to go if you had the choice. The atmosphere was relaxed and happy. The Head Teacher knew every child and adult we encountered by name, everyone was cheerful and polite. There was a swimming pool and a farm with all sorts of animals including a baby camel. It was well resourced, bright, clean, spacious, well-cared for and generally delightful. The intake was perhaps 80% Malawian, maybe 15% Asian and a sprinkling of Azungus.

We have spent quite a lot of time this week planning for the Intermediate course and beginning to write the lecture input. I spent this morning producing a Powerpoint presentation on Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences, and this afternoon trying to summarise the work of people like Froebel, Montessori and Steiner in about three slides each. This is definitely not an easy task! David is working on Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner. On a lighter note David is preparing a story-telling workshop and I am gathering materials for the students to make their own books and story sacks. We have a real need to make our own books as very little is published in Chichewa and we feel it is important for the children to have stories in their own language as well as in English. So far I have found only one story in Chichewa, the story of Blessings Minibus, and his adventures transporting people around Blantyre.

Early in the week I dropped in on Dominic who is the most senior person in Social Services in Blantyre. I wanted to keep him in the loop about the progress of our courses because if we are to stand any chance of getting them accredited by the Malawian Government his office will have to come and inspect us. I emailed him some information a week or so ago, but when I dropped in he was wading through three weeks worth of emails and had not yet seen mine. I told him we are off to Lilongwe next week to see the Ministry of Gender, Children and Community Affairs to find out the best way to get accreditation and he seemed a bit miffed. He feels that the right thing to do is to go through him, so I said I would come and see him on Friday bringing hard copies of the documents I had emailed and we parted on smiley terms, but when I went today he was at a meeting in Lunzu. I left the hard copies with a lady in his office. We are still going to Lilongwe, but at least now if the bigwigs from Lilongwe contact him he will have the information to hand. Poor Dominic, I don't envy him his job at all. He has to cover all social services issues in Greater Blantyre with a team of 12 Social Workers, talk about an impossible task! I wonder if he will come and inspect us himself, or send someone else to do it. I know he has got Gift, the Child Protection Officer who did the Introductory Course, to write a report about it, but unfortunately Gift did not pass the exam so I am not confident that his report will be as positive as it could be!

Jack's visit is getting nearer and nearer! I am more excited about it than I have been about anything for a long time! He arrives at Lilongwe on Tuesday at lunchtime. I shall actually be leaving Blantyre on Sunday afternoon and making visits to a nursery setting run by nuns in Ntcheu, UNICEF and the Ministry in Lilongwe on my way to the airport. Then we shall have five days holiday in Nkhotakota and Liwonde before returning to Mitsidi next Saturday evening.