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
