The Dairy Mail...

Hello, I hope this finds you all well.

There's not a lot to report since I last updated my blog. I spent another week at Chimwemwe, one of the Joshua feeding centres. I'm finding the situation there very stressful at times. There are now two very good, very dedicated teachers called Violet and Monica which is great news, unfortunately I seem to be fighting an ongoing battle with the committee of caregivers. They have a rota so that there are at least four present each day, each caregiver comes in to help out once a week, and it should always be the same group of women each day so for example every Monday we should have the same four women helping out – two in the kitchen cooking the meals and two in the classroom aiding Violet and Monica with behaviour control. Unfortunately it is a rare occasion to have all four caregivers present, and over the course of four weeks I have only ever seen one caregiver helping in the classroom. With the help of Stevie who very kindly translates for me I usually talk to the women present about how important it is that they help in the classroom, but it's always another week (minimum) before I see them again, giving them plenty of time to forget their role! Earlier this week only one of the four caregivers turned up in the morning, so when she went to fetch water from a nearby borehole the guard ended up cooking the porridge! Definitely not in his job description...

I then spent a few days at the school where Lizzie is working. I won't describe it in too much detail, as most of you will hear all of this from Lizzie (email erheyes@gmail.com if you want to be added to her list so you can receive her email updates) but I'll give you a basic idea. It's a private primary school (associated with the Elim Church for those of you who've heard of this) with a few free places for children who can't afford school, sponsored by the fee-paying students.

[Side note: Government primary schools are free in theory, but in practice it seems some have introduced special fees (non-optional as I understand it) for various ridiculous things which means that pupils have to pay on a termly basis or they are not allowed to attend. It's not a huge sum, but it is more than many families can afford – especially when some have many children. Also, government primary schools are HUGE. Upwards of 90 pupils per teacher, and the teachers don't necessarily always turn up! Primary school is from ages 6-14 give or take, but you can't progress up a year until you pass so there can be quite an age range in the class. Lessons are taught in Chichewa for the first four years, but then in English for the rest of school.]

Back to the Elim school...There are eight classes (one per year) and eight teachers (one of whom is the head!) Lizzie helps out in standard 5 – this is the first year which is taught in English, and the class teacher is the headmistress who seems to spend much more of her time out of the classroom than in it. This is understandable as she has many duties as the head of the school, but is an absolute joke for the class who, until Lizzie joined them, were often left on their own with nothing to do and no idea when the teacher would return. Now that Lizzie is helping out with that class it means they're never left without a teacher, but the teacher has left in the middle of quite a few lessons, expecting Lizzie to carry on where she left off. Now this isn't a problem for some subjects, but when this happens in the middle of an agriculture lesson it can pose a slight problem for her! An interesting observation is that many schools have non-uniform days every Wednesday purely for the practical reason that most pupils can only afford one school uniform so they are given Wednesdays as a laundry day! I taught my very first lesson whilst I was there – I tried to introduce them to the concept of symmetry. In hindsight, this wasn't my best decision. Symmetry is one of the more descriptive topics in maths, and my chichewa is definitely not up to that standard! When asked how it was Lizzie simply said it was OK. Not sure whether teaching is something I should be pursuing after all!

After my few days at the Elim school I returned to Chimwemwe to begin my health monitoring programme. There was a slight hiccup at the beginning when I realised I had forgotten a tape measure, but I was saved at the last minute from having to make one using a ruler and paper! It went pretty well, although I was surprised at how few children there were for it, but it made the day a slightly less stressful experience! I was pleasantly surprised by the results – most children seemed to be of a fairly healthy weight (although a lack of reliable scales or accurate dates of births does make the results slightly suspect!) with only a few children in need of particular attention. The other surprise was that every single mother of the 35 children weighed claimed to be HIV negative. Given that there is a 20% incidence of HIV here in Malawi, and this was a selection of people from one of the poorer areas of Malawi you'd expect to have a few positive results so I'm not entirely sure what's going on there, or how to deal with it, but I'll find a way :)

The fuel situation out here is interesting, to say the least...! When we first arrived back in September there were no problems with fuel at all as far as we could tell. After about a month living here, the fuel crisis hit. It was much worse for Diesel than for Petrol (absolutely no idea why) but there were long queues for each. In October we queued for over four hours to fill up the tank in our petrol car. It stayed like this pretty much the whole time until mid-January, with occasional periods when petrol was fairly easily obtained. Then, totally out of the blue, the whole problem ended. For a month from mid-January to the middle of February both petrol and diesel were easily obtained, with no fuel queues to be seen anywhere! Then, a couple of weeks ago it returned, but this time around petrol is more tricky to get hold of than diesel. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this, except a huge lack of forex in the country, and the situation can completely change over night!

Another funny observation which I don't think I have yet remarked upon is that in the Chichewa language, the letters l and r are basically interchangeable. On my daily walk to the feeding centre I go past the Mudi Frorist, I've driven past a Groly Shop a few months ago, many English words which are used for names are spelt funny (Chality, Frolence, Maly etc.), and I've been in a pre-school where the 'Dairy Routine' is painted up on the wall!! It's a good cause for a giggle every now and again.

Last week I successfully completed my 48 hour fast. Thank you so much to all of you who sponsored me! I'm really looking forward to spending it on the children, and I'll upload photos onto here of what the money is used for. (If you haven't already, and want to, you can still sponsor me – if you email me at julietheyes@gmail.com then I can send you my bank details and you can do a bank transfer, or alternatively you can post it to my sister – address on request).

And last, but by no means least, Vic has joined us at last! Along with Dan. They arrived safely on Sunday evening, and the whole Heyes clan is now back together again at last :)

Love,

Juliet/Julez x

Jumping Goats It's Another Entry...

Hey y'all! It's me again :)

There isn't a huge amount to report since I last updated this blog – no more exciting proposals for me, I'm afraid. I've been focussing all my efforts on one of our feeding centres/pre-schools called Chimwemwe.

On average there are 35 children coming every day. There's a committee of 22 caregivers, and two teachers – Violet and Agnes. In theory both teachers and four of the caregivers (according to a rota) come each day, but the caregivers don't always make it in, and they're not very good at advanced warning! Violet is fantastic and is present every day without fail, but Agnes rarely shows up, and when she does she spends most of her time lying down on a bench!

Ideally, two of the caregivers would work in the kitchen cooking the porridge, and the other two would be in the classroom with the teachers helping make sure the children behave themselves. Unfortunately, this is not actually happening! The priority is that the kids get the food, so when there aren't all four caregivers those that are present need to be in the kitchen. However, often when all of the caregivers turn up they still seem to find it necessary for all of them to be in the kitchen! We're working on this.

Unfortunately, this means that most days Violet is left on her own with up to 40 children, most of whom are fighting with each other. The age range is from 2-8 years which limits the number of appropriate topics available for teaching. The oldest children are capable of simple maths, whilst the youngest don't even know what numbers are. Violet is paid by the committee who get their money from renting out the centre for use by a local church on a weekly basis. She works from 8am to 2pm Monday to Friday and has a baby at home to look after. She gets paid MK2,000 a month, which is £8. At the moment she is supported by her brother, but he says he can't afford to support her for much longer so Violet may not be able to afford to keep working at our centre for much longer.

This is an area where the Joshua Orphan Care Trust is really trying to make progress. We're desperately trying to find ways for the centres to earn some money for themselves to try and help them become a little more self-sufficient. If anyone has any ideas or knows someone with some background in this area, my email address is julietheyes@gmail.com!

There is one child who attends our feeding centre (approximately five years old) who is deaf. Out here there is very little provision for children with disabilities of any kind, but there is a deaf school run by some nuns a little way out of Blantyre. I've been told that if a child gets accepted there, then a sum of about MK10,000 should cover their whole primary education there (8 years). This is the equivalent of about £40. However, there is some debate as to the worth of such an education. I'm not saying that they wouldn't get excellent teaching whilst they're there, but there is a shortage of jobs out here as I understand it, and I don't know of any anti-discriminatory laws here meaning that, as I see it, if there are two people equally suited for a job, but one of them is deaf and therefore considerably harder to communicate with, the other candidate is much more likely to get the job.

Hopefully within the next week I will begin my 'medical' work with the children. I want each centre to have a book in which they keep health records for the children. I'm going to buy some scales and weigh all the children (hopefully something that will be continued, so that the kids are all weighed on a monthly basis) and measure their heights and it will all be written down in the book. I would also like the centres to keep a record of the kids' medical history – any serious illnesses or accidents, any HIV/Aids in the family etc. Hopefully I will also be able to arrange for an afternoon when all the parents come for a meeting, and I'll talk to them about health and hygiene in the home – brushing teeth, washing hands, keeping cuts etc. clean but this could be more difficult to sort out if the parents all work.

Lizzie is settling in well. She's doing some private violin and piano teaching in her afternoons, and volunteering in some of the schools around Blantyre. I won't tell you much of what she does as I'm not totally sure, and I won't say it as well as she will, but if you want to receive her updates, drop her an email at erheyes@gmail.com and she'll add you to her mailing list!

Dom's still enjoying himself. School every morning, a few clubs in the afternoons – sports, mountaineering and an orchestra although that's not meeting at the moment. He's making a fair few friends, getting invited to parties, and chatting with everyone he meets (he's a lot more sociable than I am!)

Mum and Dad are continuing as before – spending long hours at work, treating lots of people and learning more as they do so! Now that Brandon's returned back home Dad and Mulinda have to share the workload between them – so they are on call every other night and every other weekend which means dad's working long hours and doesn't have a lot of free time. Mum seems to be making a bit of progress finally with the UN re her UNV status which, if it gets sorted out, will make things a little bit easier for us out here from a financial point of view.

I had a funny conversation the other day with one of my Malawian friends. We were discussing the differences in the weather here and back in England – at the time it was about 30°C in Blantyre and -5°C back home. He was struggling to imagine such temperatures, and then he said to me “I have black skin, yes. If I went to England, would my skin change colour?” A little confused I said no, and then asked him why he thought it might. He explained to me that often when white people come to Malawi, their skin changes colour. He's seen many people's skin turn red! I explained that that's sunburn and it's only a temporary thing – he was very surprised to hear this. It made me chuckle!

On Wednesday 22^nd – Thursday 23^rd February I am doing a 48 hour fast to raise money for the feeding centres where I am working. Thank you so so so so much to everyone who has already sponsored me, I am really excited about the possibilities of what I can do with this money – at the moment I am thinking about maybe using the money to pay for a play ground for the kids at three of the centres.

If anyone still wants to sponsor me, you can donate via my sponsorship page at http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/JulietHeyes. If you would prefer to give it directly to me then I can email you my bank details, or you could post it to my sister Victoria (again, address available on request), preferably before she joins us at the beginning of March.

Inside Chimwemwe Feeding Centre

Outside Chimwemwe Feeding Centre

Chimwemwe Kitchen

Goat On A Trampoline...

Good luck to all of you with exams/essays/dissertations/assignments that are taking up your time at the moment.

Thinking of you all,

God Bless,

Juliet

x

Happy New Year!

Hello There! I hope you're all well and settling back into work/school/university after a wonderful Christmas holiday. Things have changed quite a bit out here since my last entry. My sister has joined us at last (after a rather stressful journey!), the rains have begun in full force (later and heavier than usual) and we have moved house. Several times!

As many of you know, we spent Christmas away from Blantyre. We went to the lake for a few days where most of us got sunburnt! And then spent Christmas day itself at a nature reserve just outside Blantyre. It was a very surreal experience, swimming in an outdoor pool with a view over the East African Rift Valley, then having a barbecue for lunch outside with people we hadn't met before, accompanied by a local, traditional music group. It was a wonderful day, but I still prefer your typical (white) English Christmas.

Early January Sylvia returned from England so we had to move out of her house, but we had a three week gap before our next house sit. We spent a week house-sitting for a german family we know, and then Mum, Dad and Dom moved in with a couple who work at Queens. Unfortunately, there wasn't space there for Lizzie and I so we had to fit ourselves in where-ever there was space. This involved us staying with a friend for 4 days, then another friend for a night, and then back at Sylvia's until this Wednesday when we finally moved into our last house during our time out here. Needless to say, we are very happy to finally be settled into a home and able to unpack!

The Joshua feeding centres have started up again, after a month off for Christmas which allows the women from the villages to make sure their crops are coping with the change in the weather. For the rest of my time here I'm going to be focussing on three of our centres – Chimwemwe, Kasinje and Makolo. These are the three that Lauren (the teacher from England) started to help. I'm going to carry on with the work she started, making sure it's maintained and continuing it where appropriate. This is where I will use the majority of the money I raise. For those of you who don't know, I'm doing a 48hr fast on Wednesday 22^nd – Thursday 23^rd February. If you wish to sponsor me, you can do so here http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/JulietHeyes . If you have already sponsored me then can I just say Thank You very much! To be fair, given that this is my blog, I can indeed say that!

A couple of weeks ago I went with Lizzie to visit the Joshua Secondary School. It's quite different from UK schools. Class sizes range from 60 to 100 pupils, all with just one teacher. Teaching is more university lecturing style - the teacher stands at the front talking about a topic, a few questions interspersed here and there. Students, as far as I can tell, only take notes once the teacher has left the room!! Every Wednesday is a non—uniform day, as this allows the students to wash their school uniform at the weekend and on a Wednesday.

Another observation about Malawi that amazes me is the ingenuity of the people here. We're house-sitting for a family who have a sunshade made from a disused satellite dish! Many people use converted bicycles as wheelchairs. Out here lots of things are sold in bags – milk, sugar, water, gin, cream, chips, chicken etc., and I've seen children using old sugar bags with string threaded through them as school backpacks. At some of the centres the kids use loads of shreds of plastic tied together for skipping ropes.

One thing that still disconcerts me, though, is the way we (white people) are treated by the locals. Apart from a few exceptions everyone acts as though we are hugely important. If you ask someone to do something for you, they will do it gladly and thank you for the privilege of being asked! I was walking to one of our feeding centres and a young boy ran up to say hello to me, I said hello back and shook his hand. His excitement at this was the most adorable thing I have ever seen – he was laughing and dancing he was so happy, but it does make you think about why shaking a white person's hand is such a wonderful event for these children. Imagine the situation in reverse...

On a weirder note, I received my first proposal this week. Whilst waiting to meet up with a friend at the minibus station, a guy came up to me and started chatting. He asked for money, started talking to me about Nelson Mandela, then told me he wanted to marry me! This wouldn't have been quite so weird if he hadn't only been wearing a pair of too small underpants. Slightly embarrassing for both parties.

That's all I have to report for now, hope you enjoyed reading.

Love to you all,

Julez

xxxx

Oh you lucky people, you!

Hi again. Two posts in a week, aren't you all lucky! I just thought, since I'm doing my fundraising for them, I'd write you a description of the Joshua feeding centres. We have ten that we still support fully. I haven't yet visited them all, but I have seen most of them. They are split into 5 clusters depending on location, each of which is overseen by a field officer. The field officers are called Stevie, John, Agnes, Mike and Ian and is the first three of these with whom I have been working. The centres I have seen so far have differed greatly in both physical and educational standard, and it is this which we are now trying to tackle with the help of the training from boNGO. Most of the centres receive on average 45 children a day, and have around 70 registered with them.

Stevie has three centres called Chimwemwe, Makola, and Kasinje.

Kasinje is really struggling at the moment due to the fact that they don't have their own building. They currently meet in the local church, which is an extremely small mud brick building with no outside space and built in pews. This means that there is no space for the children to run around. Out the front of the building is where the women cook the porridge, and the smoke from the fire pours inside the building making it absolutely filthy. Over the road is a small plot of land available for use by the kids, but unfortunately as well as being used for playing it is also used as a toilet. Not the most hygienic of situations! When the rains (eventually) start, the small space at the front of the church which isn't taken up by the pews gets flooded, meaning that the centre is also muddy on top of everything else! Joshua is in the process of buying them some land, but even once all the paperwork has gone through they still won't be able to move there as the building needs finishing, and then painting etc. A long process.

Makola has its own (albeit small) building, but unfortunately this is on a rocky hillside meaning that the outside space is very uneven and steep making it rather unsafe for anything other than outdoor lessons. It was at this centre where I saw one of the kids wearing nothing but a chitenje (a piece of material the women wear to keep their clothes a little bit cleaner than they would be otherwise) wrapped around her, as her only clothes were being washed.

Chimwemwe is our success story! It has a good, fairly large, plain building with outdoor space for physical activities, and a nice big tree for shade. There are two very good teachers there (untrained, none of the Joshua teachers have received any formal training) but unfortunately this means that the rest of the caregivers think they don't need to do anything to help which has resulted in Violet (who, despite being only 19, is an incredible teacher!) being left to handle 60 children on her own! They are receiving some support from SAIntS (Dom's school) in the form of a second meal every day for the children, and a weekly visit of some of their students to play games with the kids. I'd really like to raise some money to paint this centre to cheer it up a bit, as at the moment it just has dirty, white walls.

Agnes has two centres called Tiyamike and Nkanamwano.

Tiyamike is another one of the centres which is really struggling from a physical point of view. This centre has its own land and a building. The land is of a good size, but pretty inaccessible. The minibuses will only take you part way, and then you have quite a long walk up and down hillsides along bad roads. If you chose to drive, the roads are horrendous. The building itself is awful. It's very small, and only has three complete walls. The fourth wall is only half built, and there's no door, just an open doorway. The roof is a straw roof, but there are more holes than actual roof, which renders it fairly useless! It isn't raised up from the ground, so every time it rains the whole building just becomes a mudpool. Thankfully there is a team coming out from England in the summer to build them a new classroom, but there is another rainy season to come before then. Agnes has told me that the centre is unusable when the rains arrive, so the village chief lets them use the local church, but I can't imagine that's going to be much better than what Kasinje are having to cope with. When I spent a morning observing this centre, there was a minor incident with a cobra in the room which was dealt with very calmly!

Nkanawano is in a much better situation. It has a large building which has been painted, and is divisible into two so that the children can be taught in smaller groups. Unfortunately, there aren't enough caregivers there to make it possible to do smaller group work. When I was visiting this centre there were two teachers to 60 children. Both teachers had babies they were looking after. At one point one of the teachers was sitting in a corner whilst the other teacher was left in charge of all the kids. At the same time as teaching them all she had a crying child on her back and another baby on her front who she was breastfeeding! Talk about multitasking!

John has four centres, but I haven't seen them all.

I have visited Kachumbe which has good grounds and a nice building (again, painted). They also have a load of desks and benches which are far too big for the age of the children attending, but since they are pretty much the only thing they own (except for an extremely deflated football) they are loathe to give them up. There were three young girls there when I visited who seemed to be too old to be attending a preschool, and they are all had babies with them (too young to attend a preschool in my opinion) whom they were looking after (presumably younger siblings) so I guess that the only way the parents could get childcare for the babies was by sending them all to the feeding centres, as a primary school wouldn't allow the girls to bring the babies with them, which means that the girls are missing out on their education.

Another one of John's centres, whose name I have temporarily forgotten, I visited briefly the other day. This one has a good building and grounds, but is situated on a hill which, when the rainy season starts, is almost completely surrounded by a really deep river leaving it totally inaccessible for three months of every year! Also, the road leading up to it is extremely bad meaning that even when the weather is dry it is hard to get to unless you have a really good car.

The rest of the centres I have not yet seen, but I am under the impression that I have seen the best and the worst of them, so the rest must be somewhere in the middle of those I have described in terms of standard. Of all the centres, only the first three (Stevie's) have anything worth mentioning in the way of resources or toys for the children.

The health of the children is quite variable, but as I haven't started my monitoring yet I can't give any particular details. Many (if not all) of them are malnourished, some very severely so. Poverty is another problem; many of the children are orphans (only have one parent) and quite a few are double orphans (no parents). The rest are vulnerables – children at risk of losing one or both of their parents. Many things in Malawi are sold in plastic bags (including the milk, believe it or not!) and I have seen children using 1K plastic sugar bags with string threaded through them as back packs!

Provisions for disabled children are few and far between. Primary schools over here are free, but these do not cater for the disabled kids. At one of the centres I saw a child who must have been at least ten, far too old for preschool, but she had hearing problems and her family can't afford to pay the contributions required for her to attend the local 'special' school.

As an aside, something funny which I have noticed is the interchangeability of the letters l and r leading to some rather funny misprints. I passed The Groly Shop the other day! And all of the feeding centres have a Dairy Routine. :)

Hopefully within the next few days I shall be able to add some photos for your perusal.

Ta ta for now

xxxx

“Baby, It's Hot Outside”...

...

“I'm Dreaming Of A Hot Christmas”

“Let It Rain! Let It Rain! Let It Rain!”

“In The Bleak Midsummer”

Yes, that's right, Christmas has come to Malawi! But the rains haven't!

Hi, I am still alive. I've just been crazy busy doing absolutely nothing. This means that I haven't had much time for writing updates, and when I have had time there's been nothing to report, but I figured it was time to write something!

Since mid October when I last wrote something here, I have been undergoing some training, paid for by Joshua (the charity for which I'm working out here). I did this with Stevie, Agnes and John – the local people I will be helping with the feeding centres. For the two weeks succeeding half term we had intensive teaching from a charity called boNGO. We saw 2 of their (extremely good) feeding centres, and had some very long sessions of education about management. Unfortunately, this was all in Chichewa and I didn't have a translator, so I can't be very sure what we were taught, but I'm sure it was extremely enlightening...!

Since then, things have gone quite slowly! boNGO spent some time looking at some of our feeding centres, and then when that's finished we will plan how we are going to go about improving our own centres. Unfortunately, this second stage took a very long time, and didn't finish until the end of November, so I had a lot of time to sit around and twiddle my thumbs :) I actually didn't mind this, and (thanks to the rule that if I have free time I have to bake) the family gained quite a lot of desserts through this, so there were few complaints! However, our centres all close in a week as this is (in theory) the start of the rainy season, so everyone is required for planting crops. This means that the reformation of our centres in all reality isn't going to start until after Christmas.

Four weeks ago we moved house. We are now living in the home of Sylvia, who runs the Joshua trust, as she went home for a couple of months and didn't want to leave her house unattended. Her house is lovely, with THREE bedrooms and an enormous garden. This means I have a bed, and my own bedroom! Which is wonderful :)

Ever since I arrived, people I've met have always asked me what school I'm going to out here (depressing, I know) but this weekend I went to a swimming gala at Dom's (secondary) school (he swam very well, but unfortunately the rest of his relay team weren't quite as good) and a student there asked me if I was one of the parents! Apparently this last week was a lot worse than I had realised!

This week I am going to visit and orphanage here in Blantyre to see if that is somewhere I could do some work on my spare time, especially when our feeding centres are on holiday. Hopefully this will work out and I can get started in the next few days as our centres are about to close so I will have a whole month with nothing to do!

That basically sums up the last 6 weeks, sorry there isn't more to report except that I miss you all and can't wait to see you when we return.

All my love,

Julez

xxxx

P.S. For anyone interested I am planning on doing a sponsored 48 hour fast. I haven't chosen a date yet, but it will probably be sometime in January. All the money raised will go towards the work I am doing with Joshua and will be used to buy stuff for the children in the feeding centres. For more information, or to donate, please see http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/JulietHeyes

Thank you :)

Still alive!

Hey y'all!

By my calculations I owe anyone interested about a month's worth of updates... Unfortunately my memory isn't that great, so details are going to be thin on the ground, but I'll give it a go!

4 weeks ago, I was still looking around the different projects available. I went to have a look at an orphanage called Open Arms, and another one called Kondonani. They contrasted greatly! Open Arms focusses mainly on the 0-2 age range. Once they reach 2 years of age they then try to rehome the children with their extended families. If there is no extended family then they look after them until they are 4 years old and then they send them to one of a number of foster homes they have set up. It is very well run, but unfortunately for me too much so as they already have enough volunteers so they don't really need me there :(

Kondonani looks after the kids until they are old enough to leave home, but this age hasn't been decided yet as the oldest orphan there is only about 13 (the orphanage was set up 13 years ago, and they only take in orphans under the age of 2) so that is a bridge they have yet to cross. Everything is done on site – meals, schooling, fun, possibly even church, but I didn't quite work that one out. The teaching system is very strange. The children all self teach, and the staff there don't seem to do anything except marking their work. I really don't think this is a very good system at all, but each to their own I suppose.

The rest of the week was unfortunately very empty, as Dom was off ill for a couple of days (nothing serious) so I had to stay home to nurse him, and then there were the planned strikes for which we were advised to stay home. That weekend we went to a cafe called La Caverna, which seems to be the meeting point for all the expats in Blantyre, as we bumped into pretty much everyone we'd met so far when we were there! One of the teachers at Dom's school also introduced me to a lady called Sylvia who runs the Joshua trust (I mentioned it a while ago with reference to my trip to Club X!) and a volunteer called Lauren who is a teacher in England, and was doing some work for Joshua at the time. I arranged to meet up with Lauren on Monday and see the work she was doing.

The next three weeks were spent shadowing Lauren and observing what she was doing. Primary schools in Malawi start at age 6, so many areas have preschools. These are of quite a low standard – the caregivers aren't trained at all, they are simply women from the village who have volunteered their time. The 'teaching' consists of them standing at the front of the 'classroom' (a small, dark, dusty one-roomed building in most cases) shouting English at the children that even they don’t fully understand and expecting them to shout it back. As far as I can tell, none of them really tell them in Chichewa what it is they're saying, so they all know how to make the sounds for the months of the year, the letters of the alphabet, the numbers etc. but they have absolutely no idea what any of it means!

Joshua has chosen some of these preschools (as many as it can afford to take on) and is providing a meal a day for the kids, and giving some basic training to the caregivers to try to improve the education the children are receiving. This is where Lauren comes in. Her background in teaching meant she was perfect for the job, so she was giving the centres some teaching resources, and showing the caregivers how to teach, and that they need to do it in Chichewa. Unfortunately, Lauren only had a few weeks here so she only managed to tackle 3 of the 10 centres that Joshua is supporting. This is where I come in! For the next year I will be continuing her work (not on my own, obviously). There is a team of wonderful local people also working for Joshua who can actually speak Chichewa, so they will act as translators for me and also support me with the work. Once we've been round all of the centres we will then go back to visit them all for longer periods of time to make sure they are continuing with the timetables we taught them, looking after the resources and teaching in Chichewa. I will also be doing a small amount of more 'medical' work there. I will be weighing and measuring the children to (hopefully) show that the meal provided is actually benefiting them, and trying to teach them some basic hygiene – washing hands before and after food and toilet trips, brushing teeth, not eating too much sugar, maybe sorting out some tablets for them to treat ringworm which seems to be quite prevalent among them. Just some basics, but hopefully it will all help them in the long run.

Aside from work we've done a few trips as a family. A week ago we went to Majete game park which is down south. We arrived on Saturday at lunch time, went on a game drive, stayed overnight, then went on a boat in the morning. This was very exciting for me as I saw lots of animals for the first time there :) We saw many antelope and monkeys, warthogs, elephants, hippos, a couple of crocodiles and some zebra! Lots of birds, too, but I'm less interested in those...!

Last weekend we went to the lake for a few days. Relaxed, swam, got sunburnt. Your standard holiday, really! It was very pretty down there, but a lot hotter too. The perfect excuse to spend all day in the lake I guess! The only snag was the four hour queue we had to sit in in order to get enough petrol for the journey! There was a nice orderly queue stretching quite far along the road, but then some people who seemed to be under the impression that they were allowed to bypass the queue and just drive straight in. Unfortunately they were right, as no-one seemed to be able to stop them! Until dad sat on an empty beer crate at the entrance to the garage to physically prevent them driving in. There was nothing we could do about the hundreds of people jostling the attendants with massive jerry cans. But we got our petrol in the end, so all's well that ends well. We sat in another queue for nearly three hours on our way home as the tank was down to a quarter, but when we were five cars away from the tank it ran out! So we'll be running on fumes soon...

That's all for now, folks.

God Bless,

Miss Malawi xoxo

Beautiful Blantyre?

I've been told to write a description of Blantyre, so here it is for those of you who are interested. I don't have any photos yet as I don't feel overly safe carrying my camera around, and it would appear that some of the local Malawians hate having their photo take even more than I do!

Blantyre is a lot hillier than I was expecting. I was looking out of the window as my plane flew into South Africa and everything I saw looked unbelievably flat. Not here. We're surrounded by a few mountains (after which Dominic's school houses are named) and apparently one of them is so tall that it is still snow capped...I'm afraid I'm going to have to be a doubting Thomas and say I'll believe it when I see it!

It is very hot here. At night we sleep with the windows open and it's still too hot (for me) even without my sheet. And it's only going to get hotter as we approach the wet season, which starts mid way through November. This means that currently it is very dry and dusty.

In general it is quite poor here – the shops are quite run down, most people walk or use the minibuses, there are people begging on the streets etc. but then there also seems to be a fair number of big cars (not all owned by expats!) and I even saw a sports car the other day! The houses we've looked at are large with big gardens and cost around £600 p/m unfurnished, and there are plenty of them, so there must be quite a market for them. The city is split up into areas, and there is quite a divide – some of them have loads of these big expensive houses with massive gardens, security and servants' quarters, whereas other areas are just stuffed full to bursting with small, poor quality, decrepit houses. Nobody here seems to own their own house – everyone rents, even those in the squalid houses.

The river, which flows through the city centre, is absolutely disgusting and the area around it stinks. Most buildings are one storey and most houses are bungalows although there are taller hotels and office blocks in the city centre.

I haven't seen much in the way of wildlife (mosquitoes excepted...) but I'm pretty sure there's plenty of it when you move away from the cities.

Food wise I'm not finding it very hard to be veggie. There's a nice vegetarian restaurant in town, and a few fairly well stocked supermarkets. I haven't done enough food shopping back home to compare prices, but mum says instant coffee is expensive and I can tell that chocolate costs a lot. Sad times :( (our address is name C/O Susan Heyes, College of Medicine, Medicine Department, Private Bag 360, Chichiri, Blantyre 3 – jokes! Sort of...!!)

The roads are interesting – there are a few main roads which are fairly wide and reasonably (I think) well tarmacked, but the pavements are just the side of the road marked by yellow line which in most places has all but disappeared! The lorries are very slow and everyone else is very impatient which leads to the maddest overtaking I've seen in my life! The situation only gets worse when there are fuel shortages as this results in queues for petrol stations miles long down the roads! Other smaller roads are pretty bad – lots of pot holes, narrow etc. and I can imagine they get pretty treacherous when the wet season arrives!

The minibuses are CRAZY! They are the only viable form of public transport as there are no trains or normal buses. There are some coaches but I think they are mainly for long distance. In the UK I guess these minibuses would seat about 10 passengers. Over here they try to make sure they have around 12 and I've heard of them seating 7, with more hanging on outside! They aren't obviously (to me) marked with their destination, there is no timetable (they just go when they're full) and no obvious stops as far as I can tell. So if you want to get on one you just have to keep flagging them down until one of them with spaces stops, and then try to find one going where you want to go, which is hard because there is slight language barrier and I find that the just want the fare (around 30p) so they'll say yes to whatever you ask them whether they are actually going where you want or not! This has resulted in me ending up on completely the wrong minibus going to quite a poor area of Blantyre which meant that more and more people were staring at me on the bus trying to work out why this white person was still there! It then reached the end of it's journey and, when I still hadn't got off, the driver asked me where I was trying to get to. This was when I discovered I was on the wrong one. Anyway, I made it home safe later on that day. And getting off them is another hurdle completely! Back home we have buttons to press to request the next stop. Here, when the minibus is getting close (hard to tell when you don't know the area) you're supposed to just shout out the name of where you want to get off. Unfortunately it would seem that we and the locals use totally different land marks and so they have no idea where we mean when we request to get off! We're slowly getting the hang of it, though.

In terms of the social side of life I'm afraid to say I haven't investigated it much since my reggae venture into Club X! Shop-wise there is quite a choice. We have Chichiri shopping mall, which contains a few shops selling various things from stationery to clothes, a large supermarket and a shop called game which sells food, household items, electrical items, bedding etc. There is also a cinema, showing fairly recent films (Harry Potter and Transformers are on at the moment, plus a few that I hadn't heard of, but I think are other new western films). I'm excited about utilising that! There are lots of shops in the city centre, but I haven't looked too closely at those yet. Most of these shops seem to have all their items behind the counter and you have to ask them to find what you want – you can't really browse through their stuff. This therefore requires you to know what you want before you go to town – no window shopping here! Also in town is a massive flea market selling everything of no value and little of any real use! That's not fair, they sell clothes and shoes, lots of electrical and DIY bits and pieces and there is a food market behind where there are lots and lots of stalls all selling the same vegetables! There is also a meat and fish section but I passed through that part as quickly as I could! People seem to use whatever land they can find, be it on a road island or a roundabout, to grow vegetables to sell, so these are available all along most major roads too, as well as the flea market in town. There are a couple of other markets throughout Blantyre but I've only passed those I haven't actually been in them. I find them quite stressful as everyone tries to get you to buy their stuff and I suspect they mark it up quite a but when they see a white person coming. I'm going to have to bite the bullet at some point and get bartering, as I can see that's going to come in handy at some point over the coming year!

I can't really think of anything else to describe to you so, if you haven't fallen asleep by now, thank you for reading. If you have fallen asleep, thanks for trying!

God Bless,

Julez

xxxx