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
