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2009 Visit Blog

Monday 29th Dec 2008

Today I went to the nurse at my doctor’s surgery to have some injections for my trip. I knew I would need a few but she was able to tell me exactly what I needed. As I am visiting for a fairly short period, and not living there or working in remote areas for a long time I needed Polio, Typhoid, Hepatitis and Tetanus injections. I have to say I hate injections but these were the best I have ever had and I hardly felt a thing.

Tuesday 30th Dec

…Ouch, my arms really ache today!! I have been to trying to speak to someone official at the Malawian High Commission office in London because I think I will need another injection for Yellow Fever. Yellow Fever is a nasty disease that can be found in a lot of countries in the middle of Africa. Luckily, Malawi does not have any cases of yellow fever disease at the moment but the problem is that if you are arriving in Malawi from a country where there is yellow fever, you have to have had a yellow fever vaccination. Unfortunately for me, my flight to Malawi stops for 20 minutes in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. Ethiopia does have yellow fever! Although I won’t be leaving the airport, I think it is just worth getting the injection otherwise they might not let me off the plane in Malawi….and that would be a disaster!

Saturday 17th January

Today is that day that I have been preparing for for some time. My flight, with Ethiopian Airlines leaves from Terminal 3 at London Heathrow Airport at 8.20pm.

When I got there I had to move some things into my hold luggage (the baggage that goes in the baggage hold at the bottom of the plane rather than hand luggage which you take with you and put under your set). Ethiopian Airlines allow you to take 40kg in your suitcase (that’s a lot) but your hand luggage must weigh less than 7kgs; mine weighs 11kgs because I have 2 laptops and quite a few gadgets all in the bag! My only choice was to put Yankho’s new laptop into my suitcase. I didn’t want to because I’d rather make sure it is safe with me and also because the hold gets very very cold and I was worried that this could damage the laptop screen. However it was the only thing I could do. I checked in at 5.30 and I got on the plane at 7.15pm. It was then that I remembered from aeroplane flights in the past that flying, (although I love flying) always sounds more exciting when you are planning it or when you are looking back at it! Luckily I managed to get a seat by the window with extra leg room so that was a bit more comfortable. We took off and headed on the long journey to Lilongwe in Malawi, the first part of the journey was to Rome in Italy where we stopped for an hour to refuel.

I read part of a book in the terminal bookshop at Heathrow which reminded me that Malawi is the 7th poorest country in the world. I am very excited about the trip and am looking forward to discovering about Africa and Malawi. I feel very excited but strangely a little nervous about what I will find and what it will actually be like. It’s very late now and I am on the way to my next stop in Ethiopia so I’ll stop now. My next blog will be from Malawi tomorrow!

Sunday 18th January

As we approached the airport at Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, I was amazed to see how the landscape was brown – just sand and dirt and dust. As we were about to land, I saw hundreds of buildings in the ‘shanty town’ areas surrounding the city centre. These are houses that are made by people out of any old waste materials and they are built very closely together. There is not usually any water or sewers to take the waste away in shanty towns.

The landing was good and I got off the plane for half an hour before boarding my final flight to Lilongwe in Malawi. Since London I have met two Malawian people who were a little older than me and who were travelling back to Lilongwe for a break from their studying in London. The lady I sat next to has not been back to Malawi since last January and she has 4 children waiting for her – the youngest is 10 years old. I asked if she missed them all and she said yes but she had to go to university in London because then she could get a good job in Malawi and have enough money for her children. Her husband is a doctor and he trained in London for five year too!

Eventually after another 4 hours, we came through lots of cloud and landed in heavy rain in Lilongwe. It is the rainy season until about April. That means that it is warm (sometimes hot) and quite humid. I am glad I had my Yellow Fever injection because I would not have been allowed into Malawi without my certificate. My bags came quickly and I managed to get through customs without any problems. (Customs are the department who check that you are not bringing things that you shouldn’t be into the country. I was a little worried that they would ask me why I had two laptops and perhaps take one away!) The airport is small so they have time to stop and check every passenger.

Outside I got a taxi which took me straight to my hotel. It’s called the Riverside Hotel but I can’t see any river. It’s in a quiet area away from the main city. I checked in and 3 minutes later there was a knock on the door and it was Mr. Assan, the Headteacher of Yankho Elementary School, who had come to welcome me! It was great to finally meet him because until then I had only ‘talked’ to him via email. Soon afterwards, he took me to the school for a tour. We caught a minibus right outside the hotel into the Old Town then changed and got another to Area 23 where the school is. From the ‘bus stop’ there is a 10 minute walk. Area 23 is at the end of a road….well the road carries on but is just mud and very very bumpy. The minibuses cost 100 Malawian Kwacha which is about 47p for each journey (so about £2 a day) The vans are battered and dented. Almost every minibus has a huge crack in its windscreen. They rattle and shake but they are the way that most people seem to travel around the city.

Area 23, and the townships that I passed through to get there, are very poor areas. There are no pavements, just muddy edges to the roads and many houses, simply made but proudly owned everywhere you look. There seem to be hundreds of people either sitting around watching the world go by or walking around looking busy. At the edge of the road every so often there are simple stalls where a man or woman might be selling charcoal or maize. In some areas there might be a group of teenagers selling strips of rubber which they have got from taking an old tyre apart. Sometimes there are men making small pieces of furniture or selling second hand sofa. Everything here is reused or recycled. The air is a little smoky and there is occasionally singing & music and quite a lot of shouting. I haven’t seen any other white faces since the airport and in the hustle & bustle of the townships and bus rides; it takes a bit of getting used to.

Mr Assan showed me round the school, the grounds are about the size of a normal school hall, perhaps a little larger. Within that space he has built (himself) five classrooms, a yard, two outdoor toilets and a house for himself and his family of 6….in fact it’s seven because two weeks ago his daughter had a baby boy. I was amazed to see the school and classrooms and relate them to the photographs on the website and in school. Each classroom holds up to about 20 children and is about the size of our medical room! I was amazed.

I was also amazed by Mr Assan’s dedication and belief in the school. He created the school three years ago as a dream that he had and he named it Yankho, a word which in Chichewa (Malawian language) means ‘answer’ because he says the school is the answer to his dreams from God. He has plans to build another classroom and make it even bigger.

After the tour, we went into Mr Assan’s house & he introduced me to his wife Sarah & his four children. Then Sarah made me my first ever portion of Nsyma, the national food of Malawi made from maize (corn on the cob). It is a bit like mashed potato dumpling. You scoop it up with your fingers & then scoop up some beans and eat it all together. It is amazing to go from the mud and soil paths, yards and pavements into people’s houses which are simple walls with corrugated steel roofs and well furnished. I was very surprised to see that in the school house, Mr Assan has a TV and DVD player as well as a telephone although it is not working at the moment due to vandalism! Most surprising of all is that amidst all the poverty (and you could say chaos) of the township, so many people have mobile phones. In fact Mr Assan’s first advice to me was to buy a Malawian SIM card for my phone so that we could contact each other cheaply. We bought one straight away from a lady at the side of the road and ‘bingo,’ I have my own Malawian phone number! Despite the poverty, and in some cases squalor of the townships, there is a perfect mobile phone signal everywhere. I don’t think he believed me when I said that we have no mobile reception in Trellech!!

While I waited with Mr Assan for the minibus back to the hotel, we saw an amazing sight. Today the leader of the opposition party (the political group that is not in charge of the country right now) was holding a meeting nearby and was due to pass through the main road of Area 23. There was a large group of children, men and women running, chanting and singing as well as waving branches from trees. They got louder and louder and passed off into the distance. The mood was good and people were clapping – I really feel I have arrived in ‘real’ Africa.

Yankho Elementary School starts every morning at 7.30am and ends at 3pm. I have to get a minibus tomorrow at 6.30am (4.30 am UK time).

Monday 19th January

Today was a very good day. It started with breakfast – just bread and butter and cereals on offer and its best not to drink milk when you are in tropical countries as it can make you feel a bit ill…..so I had bread! I got on a minibus outside the hotel and headed to the changeover point in ‘Old City’. It’s an amazing place because it is one of a number of places in the city where minibuses meet and passengers change vans. However it is literally just a muddy patch of land next to the road with possibly about 100 white minibuses and about 500 people milling around and all very busy and chaotic whatever time of the day you pass through. I arrived at school at 7.35am and the children were already in their classes.

Soon afterwards, the teachers brought all the children onto the ‘yard’ for assembly. I was honoured to watch from the side as one of the teachers prepared the children with some ’warm up’ drills like marching, clapping and singing. Then the assembly started. It included a lovely welcome speech from Mr. Assan, a prayer, singing the national anthem of Malawi and a short speech from me. I tried to speak slowly and quite simply. Afterwards, the children marched back to their classes singing ‘We are marching in the light of God’ and it was break time.

I took some photographs and videos and the children were fascinated especially when I turned the video camera screen for them to see themselves being filmed! It struck me that not only had the children never seen video cameras and digital cameras but most had probably not seen themselves before! I think they literally thought the equipment that we use and take for granted were some kind of magic! We returned to Mr Assan’s office (his front room) and drank cocoa & ate cassava, another Malawian traditional food which is a root vegetable, boiled and tasting quite like potato but a little sweeter.

Later Mr Assan and I travelled into the city centre (which looks nothing like any city centre I have ever seen before because each road and building is surrounded by massive wide open overgrown spaces with worn muddy paths made by people taking shortcuts from building to building. We visited the British Council where Mr Assan uses the internet twice a week, often to contact us at Trellech and we also met some of his friends in the VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) office. Afterwards we took a short walk to the British High Commission (in countries that are part of the British Commonwealth, Britain has a High Commission led by a High Commissioner – in countries that are not in the Commonwealth we have an Embassy led by an ambassador). Mr Assan wanted me to meet Enoch, a Malawian who works at the Commission and who helped me with some of the organisation of the trip. Enoch was a good man, about to go to lunch so he invited us to join him! We ate by the High Commission’s swimming pool and I chose fish & chips….well Malawian Chambo and chips, another first. The fish is found in a few Malawian lakes but the Chambo which we ate (& which they said was best) is from Lake Malawi.  We talked for about an hour and I learned a lot about the Commission’s work in Malawi, the Malawian president and the elections which take place on May 19th this year. It seems that the current president will win the election and continue to serve. He is popular and done a lot it seems to make Malawi better.

After the High Commission we headed back to a bus stop (minibuses stop anywhere but this was a starting place on a street corner). Unfortunately the minibuses wait until they are full before they start the journey so that they make more money. They are privately owned and there are no rules! You literally pay the driver 100 Kwacha (about 47p) per journey, no receipts, no seat belts, and a lot of bumps! Unfortunately because not many people wanted to go to Area 23…..we sat in the minibus waiting to leave for 45 minutes! It was quite amusing watching the minibus driver arguing with a taxi driver about who should have ‘first picks’ on passengers as they arrived!

Back at school, Mr Assan & I thought it would be helpful to have an IT lesson so I explained how to use the new laptop. Although he has taught himself how to use email and the internet at the British Council office, his children have never used a computer – it was all very new – and it was Windows Vista which is good but a bit different! I showed Mr Assan how to start & shutdown the laptop, use Word & Excel (he uses these currently) and then how to use his new USB memory stick as well as how to use his new digital camera and how to copy the pictures to the laptop using the USB card reader I took. I also talked about how to use the battery charger. It is so important for gifts to be sustainable. What is the point of giving a £50 digital camera if it is useless when the batteries run out and he cannot afford to buy more?

I got the ‘23’ minibus back to Old Town at 5pm and before getting the ‘25’ minibus; I crossed the road and visited my first Malawian supermarket. I was quite surprised by the prices which were very roughly the same as back in Wales….but then you have to remember that, being the world’s 7th poorest country, most people here survive on less than $2 a day (about £1.30).

Tuesday 20th January

Today I met Mr Assan at ‘Old Town’ depot at 8am as we were to travel to meet a friend of his who lives in Area 9. Cassie is one of Mr Assan’s students and he teaches her Chichewa, the national language of Malawi. She lives in a nice house in an area where a number of business people live, little way from the centre of the city. Cassie’s husband works in the city and Cassie was a teacher in the UK and now works in a school outside the city where the class size is 160 pupils to 1 teacher! She has worked for Oxfam on their education program. It was fantastic to meet her and to talk about the issues facing education in Malawi. I learned that 50% (half) of children drop out of primary school education in Malawi. Mr Assan thinks this is due to lessons not being interactive and engaging enough and that leads to children asking ‘what is the point’ of coming to school?

Cassie has also worked on school partnerships and has a great understanding of the benefits of linking with schools around the world and how to make the most of partnerships like this. It was a little strange going into her house because once the gate man had opened the gate for us and allowed us in, we were suddenly in a home which was very British & could have been in Trellech. There were children’s toys and games and all the sort of things that we have in our homes. She also has a gardener and his wife works in the house. All houses in this area have security guards / watchmen and most have no problems.

After our visit we headed back to school, stopping off at a supermarket in the city. We bought bread and juice and I bought some Marmite when I saw it on the shelf as I wanted to introduce Mr Assan (& his family) to my favourite toast spread! I explained that, “you either love it or hate it” and I think he and his son both quite liked it!

 In the afternoon, we had some bread (& Marmite) for lunch and I spoke to Stella, one of the teachers at Yankho who was cooking nsyma for her lunch in the yard. Another teacher cooked kapenta, small fish imported from Tanzania which are eaten with nsyma. I took some photographs and video around the school including the toilets which are literally a whole in the ground and used by all the children and Mr Assan’s family. He showed me the outside tap which provides all the fresh water for the family and school (eating, drinking, cleaning, washing, ‘showering’ etc) as well as the bathroom he has made. There is no bath or taps, just a private room for pouring water over yourself to get clean. Outside this is a rubbish pit which is used for all rubbish. When it is full, Mr Assan digs it over and uses the rotten rubbish as compost for his small Maize garden. In this part of the grounds he has a peach tree, guava tree, mango tree & paw paw tree.

I showed Mr Assan more of the gifts that we had collected for the school and he was fascinated by the parachute. We played a couple of games with the remaining children (there are no lessons on Tuesday afternoon but some children ‘hang around’ or are not collected until 5pm. We had another IT lessons and I showed Mr Assan how to copy files, and change setting on the laptop. It rained for about 1 ½ hours and I cannot tell you how noisy the rain is on the roof of his house. I asked him how the noise from rains affects lessons and learning and he said that sometimes the teachers take the children outside or stop their lessons.

I headed back from the hotel at 4.30pm and it was a very long & difficult journey with very heavy traffic and just like in Wales, when it rains, everything goes slow on the roads. The minibus drivers are very ‘cheeky’ and never, ever, ever let other drivers out. They constantly sound their horns and the ‘conductor’ constantly shouts out to passers by where the minibus is going.

Today is a very important day for the USA and the world and in particular, quite fittingly, for Africa. As I am typing this blog, I am listening to Barak Obama being sworn in as the first black president of the USA. I will remember today.

Wednesday 21st January

Today I wanted to be at school again to see the children arrive for their lessons. They line up on the yard & then their teachers take them in their lines into their classrooms. There is one little girl in the Nursery before who is clearly very scared of me! I think it is totally understandable because I think I am the second white face that most of the children have ever seen. She cries most of the time and that turns into a deafening scream if ever I look at her – she looks petrified poor thing!

This morning, I showed Mr Assan the ‘Wales for the Air’ photographic picture book that I brought with me. He was fascinated by the number castles that we have in Wales and found it strange that nobody lives in them now. We talked about the different landscapes in Wales and looked at the different towns and cities pictured. Afterwards we went outside and I showed the children, class by class, some of the games you can play with a parachute. They REALLY enjoyed it and their faces were great to watch. Mr Assan is really determined to make learning fun and less traditional and it was wonderful to see the teachers’ faces too. He said that the game was so important because it was probably the reason why most of the children would want to come to school again tomorrow. He is concerned because so many children just do not go to school. Primary school is ‘available’ for all children but government school which are free have very big classes (sometimes over 100 children for each teacher!) Mr Assan says that the buildings are bigger but the education is less good and many children (about 50+ %) drop out before they get to Year 6. Private schools like Yankho get no money from the government and the parents have to pay for their children to go there. It costs 500 Kwacha per month – that’s just less than £2.50. Many parents in the township cannot afford this so their children simply do not go to school. Also, some parents send their children to Yankho but then have trouble affording the fees so have to remove their children permanently of for a few weeks. I also learned that government school teachers earn a little more, about 6000 Kwacha a month (just less than £300) however at Yankho; Mr Assan can only afford to pay the teachers 3000 Kwacha which is nearly £150 per month. In Wales, teachers earn at least £1000 per month.

Next, I took a photograph of each child in Standards 2, 3 and 4 because they are writing an information sheet about themselves for the children in RG5 and we wanted to make sure the photographs match the writing. We had a short staff meeting in Mr Assan’s front room and we wrote down each child’s name. It was only after about 10 minutes that I noticed the one of the teachers sitting next to me actually had her baby strapped to her back – he was fast asleep!

Mr Assan, his son and I had lunch next. He & his family have been so generous this week ensuring I try traditional Malawian food. Today it was rice, beans, onion and egg in a tomato sauce. It tasted very good. I have to keep reminding myself that every drop of water that is used from washing our hands in a bowl before eating, to cooking rice, making cocoa to drink, washing clothes and personal hygiene comes from one tap outside. There is no sink, no draining board, and no kitchen worktop. Mr Assan has two daughters (and two sons) and both help their mother who is also a teacher at the school) to wash clothes, wash up, tidy the house and prepare food. They work hard.

After lunch, we went out to the yard to introduce the children to rugby! I brought a football and rugby ball (again, I also brought a pump – it’s not so much of a nice gift if you can’t blow the ball up when it starts to go down!) We split the oldest class into two groups and I marked out two tri lines in the dirt and we started practicing passing the ball and touch tackling when…….out of nowhere, it started pouring with rain – very heavily. It’s the rainy season so you tend to get warm or hot weather then short sharp showers or, in this case, long intense showers. We went back inside and again the noise on the tin roof was deafening. As we spoke I had to really raise my voice to be heard. It sounds a bit exaggerated but I was aware that my throat was hurting a bit from having to talk so loudly. I asked Mr Assan what do he and his family do if it is raining in the evening when they all tend to sit in the front room and perhaps watch TV – he replied that they just watch the pictures because they can’t hear the words! I think all of the buildings that I have seen in Area 23 have the same corrugated roofs. Very effective but very noisy. It is interesting looking at how the houses are built. Here, there are no frosts, very strong cold winds and freezing temperatures so the doors fit loosely into the frames. There are gaps but it doesn’t really matter. It is January right now but in Malawi that means it’s hot and wet and the door of the house are open during the day time – windows really do not need to be double glazed in countries with climates like this.

The rain went on for about 1 ½ hours and it was clearly not going to stop for a while. Interestingly the children go home at lunchtime from 12-2pm and when, like today, the weather is bad, many children just don’t come back for the afternoon session. I decided to head back to the hotel and, being a bit earlier, it meant I could look into a few of the shops in the Old Town. Even more so than yesterday, there was a significant stream outside the school. The rain from people’s gardens flow into the lane, the lane flows down towards the school and after heavy tropical rain like this, a very large stream soon forms and this makes walking up the paths quite challenging, especially if you want to try to keep dry. It is impossible to keep your feet dry or anything like clean. Despite this, the carpeted parts of Mr Assan’s house are incredibly clean and tidy. The bad thing about these streams is that as they flow, they wash away the top soil, the top layer of earth on the land. It is this part of the soil which holds all the nutrients and goodness that plants and crops need to grow so rain like this has a real effect on the success of crops (we tend to think that crops in Africa don’t grow because “it never rains”!) At the ‘bend in the road’ where we get on and off the minibus, the road is mud, there is no tarmac here. It is literally a mud bath with cars and minibuses and the occasional large lorry driving through, splattering mud & puddle water all over anyone standing nearby. There are also many, many huge pot holes which also fill up with water and make driving very uncomfortable.

By the time I got to Old Town, the rain was less so I decided to have a look around and walk some way back to my hotel. I saw the large market next to the now swollen Lilongwe River and I went over to the Malawi Police Headquarters with a hope that I could get a picture of Dai the Dragon with a Malawian Policeman. I spoke to ‘Ernest’ who was on duty at the front desk and he was very happy to pose for the photograph which was great.

I then headed back to the hotel to try hard to connect to the internet and upload some of the pictures and this blog to the school website. (I have to say it’s been a real shame that until today, our website company has been improving their equipment so I haven’t been able to edit the website. Also, the free wireless internet access (wifi) in the Reception area is VERY VERY temperamental and incredibly slow! Usually it says that it cannot connect to the internet and I am forever asking the lady behind the counter to (put her Sudoku book down and) reboot the wireless hub.

Thursday 22nd January

I met Mr Assan at ‘Shoprite’ a shopping centre near to Old Town which is popular with more wealthy Lilongwe residents and foreign workers. The food in the supermarket is more expensive but there is more choice and it is quite like home in many ways. We headed back to school on a number 23 minibus during which time two incidents made me appreciate how things work in the city. We had to walk to a different pick-up point as the depot at Old Town was (very slightly) less busy as it was a little after rush hour. When we eventually found a number 23 minibus, we got on and started our journey. We stopped in a different place to pick up passengers and quickly two men in fluorescent jackets approached the bus. It was quite clear that their job was to stop our bus jumping in & picking up passengers and therefore to protect the minibuses who were ‘starting off’ here. Our driver and money collector/door opener started answering back. The man who had tried to get on backed off and our minibus pulled away. We went in front of a parked minibus & pulled in & the conductor shouted for the passenger to Jump in. Again the day-glow men returned and we did the same thing again. This time one of the men went round to the driver’s window & grabbed the wheel – he appeared to be blocking the way and for a moment it got a bit ‘hairy’. Mr Assan explained that while they were trying to protect the other drivers from ‘poachers’, they were also trying to get money from our ‘crew’ to allow them to pick up. We sat there for some time & a few punches were thrown though all of the passengers just sat and waited patiently quite unflustered. It struck me that this hustling was all about one man’s 50 Kwacha fare, about 43p.

I was now aware of a large group of men forming on the opposite side of the road and I wondered if it was to do with our minibus’s dispute. I then notice the men start to walk then run towards the road as a large pickup truck approached with about 10 people on the back and a lot of metal buckets. The men ran to the lorry and some started to climb on. Mr Assan explained that this was a delivery of fish from the lake and that the men were trying to buy it. Very quickly buckets started being off-loaded and taken away. If people started trying to take a bucket without paying or grabbing fish from a bucket, a man on the back with a big stick was frantically hitting them off. It was quite comical that in the mad rush t the lorry, I was aware that one younger man dropped his mobile phone which hit the road, broke into three pieces and was then run over by two cars before he stopped the traffic, picked up the pieces, put them back together and made a call while climbing up on the lorry (and being hit back down!)

At the school I was treated to a wonderful ‘special assembly’ in which selected children stood in the middle of the yard and recited poems that they had learned. The teachers each then gave a speech as did Mr Assan, who asked me to say a few words.

Later in the afternoon, Mr Assan and I travelled to the city centre (by taxi because we were a little late). It was while waiting at the bend in the road that I discovered his hand gestures. If you want to as an approaching minibus or taxi if they are going to the city centre, you put your hand out (as if to shake it) then turn your fingers out and make a ‘to the right’ gesture (as if showing someone the way). If you want to ask, “Are you going to Old Town?” you do the same with your left hand! Great and very simple. Today everyone seems to be going to Old Town!

We met with Alex, one of Mr Assan’s Chichewa students who works in the Malawian government’s Department of Trade and Industry. The building was quite old fashioned – Mr Assan said it was built in the South African style – Malawi has long been friendly with South Africa, even during times when South Africa was treating black people very badly and most other countries were not helping them to live and trade. Alex is from Exeter but, by coincidence, he studied at Cardiff University so knows the area well. He is an economist and is helping to improve private businesses to develop and grow in Malawi and he is trying to help the government to make Malawi a more attractive place to set up a business. It was fascinating talking to him about his job and the improvements that are being made. He told me that despite all we hear of the ‘credit crunch’ which hasn’t really affected Malawi, the country has the world’s second fastest growing economy (it grew by 9% last year). We also talked about education and schooling in the country. For a few years now, primary education 4-11 years has been free to everyone in Malawi but it is not compulsory so you don’t have to go. There are two types of school; government schools which are free but very overcrowded and private schools which charge a fee. The problem seems to be that in the free government schools, the classes are big, there are not many teachers and therefore children can get very bored and many drop out before they reach Year 6 (Standard 6). Many other children just don’t go to school, usually (in these areas) because their parents ‘just don’t bother to send them’ (in the words of Mr Assan). They cannot afford private school fees and perhaps the government school is too far away and they just don’t understand the importance of education. We also talked a lot about health and disease and I was surprised to learn that everyone catches malaria! Mr Assan has had it many times and people expect to catch it about once a year. It makes you poorly for 3-4 days and is a little like ‘strong flu’. If you are relatively fit and healthy, you can fight it off and get over it (a bit like a cold or flu) but if you are already ill, old or young, it can be life threatening, especially if you cannot get malaria drugs. It’s not so much that malaria is a deadly disease, just that it is if you cannot get treatment for it and you are young, ill or old.

After lunch with Alex at a roadside cafe, (I could get used to the idea of sitting down and eating lunch!) we said goodbye and headed to the British Council to meet a man called Faith who co-ordinates the Global Schools Partnership in Lilongwe. He was really interested to hear our plans for sharing learning between our schools and explained that we could register our ‘partnership’ on the British Council website, we could be eligible for funding to provide more learning materials and information as well as a trip for Mr. Assan to Wales. After our meeting, I showed Mr Assan Google maps and, having travelled the minibus routes from area 25 to area 23for 5 days, I was able to identify exactly where Yankho School is from Google’s satellite photographs. I think Mr Assan was amazed as he had not been to this website before. I have promised to print the photo out and send it to him so that he can show the children Area 23 and the school – from space! Again I wondered how he would even start to explain the idea of space and satellites!

Our final appointment was a short minibus ride away in Area 12, another more affluent part of the city. Here roads are wide and empty and gardens are well tended and for recreation rather than growing crops. We visited another of Mr Assan’s Chichewa students called Barbara who used to be a German social worker. Well she still is German but her background is in working with young people, helping them to understand about HIV/AIDS, a disease that causes enormous problems throughout Africa. We had a really fascinating talk for an hour before we noticed the sky turning darker and felt we should head back to the minibus stop before the inevitable afternoon tropical downpour.

The journey back to Old Town then the hotel was eventful. Again, the minibus was very slow. You have to realise quite quickly that the minibus gets you from A to B but it’s on the driver and conductor’s terms. They will do everything to fill every seat and if that means stopping by a known hot-spot for 10 minutes shouting “Townie, Townie,” then that’s what they do. The heavens opened and by the time I got off at Shoprite and tried to cross the road I was absolutely (ABSOLUTELY) soaked to the skin. This is a busy intersection in the middle of the city yet the rain water was about 20 cm deep, very brown and muddy and flowing very fast across the road and car park to the river. I had no choice but to walk through it quickly and got very very wet! There was simply no dry route from one side of the road to the other. It is like this every day at this time of year!

2010 Visit Blog

Thurs 18th February

Today is half term and the day that I have an appointment with the nurse at my doctor’s surgery so that I can get the malaria tablets that I need to go to Malawi. Last year I used tablets called Malerone. They are very good but very expensive. Malaria is a very nasty disease that is carried and spread by mosquitoes in many tropical parts of the world – if you catch malaria you will be very ill and if you are not fit and healthy you could die. Unfortunately malaria is quite common in many countries like Malawi. I was shocked last year to learn from Mr Assan that most people in Malawi expect to catch malaria each year and they just accept that they will be unwell for a number of days then make a recovery (hopefully). Unfortunately anti-malaria medicines are expensive and most people in Malawi cannot afford them. There are others ways you can protect yourself from mosquitoes which carry malaria, like always sleeping under a mosquito net at night, trying to cover as much of your skin with dark clothes and wearing mosquito repellent (cream)… but if you are bitten and you haven’t taken tablets it can be very nasty. Many charities that work in countries like Malawi give out thousands of mosquito nets to families and people really understand how to reduce the chance of being infected. If people can get a mosquito net to sleep under then because that automatically protects them for about 8 hours that is 1/3 of the day that they can’t be affected and are safe!

 The World Health Organisation says that every year 250 million people catch malaria and 1 million of these people die. You can find out more about malaria by clicking

http://www.malariahotspots.co.uk

Saturday 6th / Sunday 7th March (From Lilongwe)

Today was the day that I started my journey to Malawi. I left home at 10.30am heading to Heathrow Airport in London. I have brought a few clothes, just the minimum really because I wanted to use most of my 46KG baggage allowance on the equipment for Yankho School. When you fly on  a plane you are allowed a certain amount of weight for the suitcase and bags that you put in the ‘boot ‘ of the plane, called the hold and on this flight it’s a maximum on 46kg. Any more than this they charge you £40 for up 64 kg. You can take one piece of ‘hand luggage’ with you into the plane. Because I booked my tickets online I managed to get seats next to the window which is great except that I cannot reach up to get anything from my bag and, just like in the films, the lady next to me keeps snoring and her head keeps flopping lightly onto my shoulder!

The flights were long and the first one was delayed by an hour. I felt really tired after the difficult first day but I couldn’t sleep for a while. Finally after listening to my MP3 player for a bit I dropped off to sleep for about 4 hours (I think it was half way through the Kings of Leon album…which doesn’t usually make me sleep!)

 I watched as, very slowly the horizon in the east got lighter and the top of the sun crept into view. What a beautiful sunrise! We landed in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia at 6.40am and I recognised straight away the shops and transit lounge (the part of the airport you go to if you are not stopping in Ethiopia, just passing through). I had a sort through my bag and then bought a dress for Mrs King in the shop. She had asked me to get one and I think the shops will be closed when I come through here next Saturday night. It’s really colourful with red, yellow and green from the Ethiopian flag and was a real bargain!

 The security at Heathrow and Addis Ababa has always been good but today it was very tight and took ages to pass through. The lady who X rayed my bag looked like Cheryl Cole (but I don’t think it was her!) As I walked off the plane into the airport in Addis Ababa I recognised the very distinctive smell from my last visit. It was a smell that I remember from Ethiopia and Malawi, hard to describe but a mixture of smoke (from charcoal which is burned for heat and cooking) and the smell of the plants and nature!

 It’s fascinating watching people in places like airports. People from all over the world, in all sorts of clothes, going to all sorts of places for all sorts of reasons. I watched as two Japanese businessmen approached each other (they had Japanese flag badges on their ties) and bowed three times before they started talking to each other. They had a chat and a joke for a few minutes then bowed again and went their separate ways.

 It’s amazing flying over Africa and looking down. It feels like you have only just left the UK yet suddenly you look down and see rivers and wonder what sort of animals live in them, you see forest and think of troops of monkeys that might swing in the branches (I’m sure they wouldn’t be) and you see homes and wonder how similar or different they might be to your own. I read in a book last night that there are 500,000  African Elephants (that’s half a million) left in the wild across the continent. I thought that was quite good as I would have thought there would be less than that but I do know they are endangered.

 I am writing this from my window seat of the Boeing 737 which is taking me now to Lubumbashi, in Congo. It is really hard because there is such little leg room that I cannot open my laptop screen enough to see it properly. We are just flying over a large lake though and there is a mountain range in the background which has quite a lot of cloud over the top. I’ve just watched the new film from Sandra Bullock which made me miss my children….It’s now Sunday  (1pm local time -11am in Wales) and I’ll be speaking to them this evening on Skype so I can show Mrs King her dress. Skype is really easy to set up. If you have a friend with a PC, try to use a webcam and see if you can download Skype and have a live video link with them. Webcams cost about £20 Downloading and using Skype is free). If you haven’t got a webcam, you can borrow one from school – come and see me when I get back and you could try it out.

When I got to the airport I went through the passport and Yellow Fever controls quickly and was in the taxi heading to my hotel within 15 minutes of the plane landing….not like Heathrow! Mr Assan was already waiting at the hotel so it was great to see him again. We headed to his school but time was getting on and I was concerned about it getting too dark so I returned to the hotel and said goodbye to him – I’ll get to the school tomorrow at 8am (6am UK time!!!) As I walked back I thought about how much warmer and dustier the streets were since I was here in January last year. It all looks very familiar but is quite a lot warmer – about 80 degrees today, like a hot summer say at home. As I approached Old Town I heard a fantastic sound and realised the singing was coming from a church hidden between two old buildings. It is Sunday and inside were about 100 people who were singing very loudly and praying. This singing turned to shouting and a sort of chanting. I recorded a few minutes on our school MP3 recorder and if it sounds good I will upload it to the website when I get back home (sounds, music and video takes SO long when you are using a slow internet connection). The internet is a lot slower here than at home.

 I have just spoken to home which was brilliant. It took a while for the Skype to work but we got there in the end. Amazing! 

Have you watched the interviews with Rev. Sandra, Dr. Christmas & PC Holder Yet? This week I’ll be working with the children here to record similar interviews with a doctor, vicar and police officer here in Lilongwe. Enjoy school this week!

 Monday 8th March

I slept well last night under a blue mosquito net. Breakfast started at 6.30am so I got there at the start – I think we will be busy today. As I said yesterday I brought two huge holdalls of play and learning equipment for Yankho School and now I am a little concerned whether I will be able to get it all there. Transport is on private minibuses and they get very squashed. You don’t see many official buses around Lilongwe; most people don’t have cars so get from A to B using one of hundreds of white minibuses. There are no seatbelts, no suspension (lots of pot holes in the roads which hurts a bit if you are sitting at the back) and it cost 100 Kwacha (about 48p) wherever you are going. The vans are literally falling apart and nearly all have cracked windscreens but they are easy to use and cheap….and the only option apart from walking. Yankho School is in Area 23, a township about 7 miles from the centre of Lilongwe and Old Town, the market area where I am staying.

I remembered that I have to get off the minibus on the ‘big bend’ a little while after the tarmac road turns to mud. The area looked the same, very busy, lots of hustle and bustle and lots of people looking and staring at the white man with the big holdall! I have only ever met friendly people in Malawi. People are curious and look and stare quite a lot but they are just interested in a stranger with different colour skin. Having said that, I seem to look very white at the moment which I think is something to do with my malaria tablets (seriously).

 The 5 minute walk into the township to the school is quite quiet and peaceful. It’s a mud path which is much drier and dustier than it was last year. So far I have seen no rain. Mr Assan tells me that now, in March, it is getting drier and warmer than January when I came last year. The first thing I noticed about the school was the new wall where the door used to be and the new school entrance and sign. I entered the front gate and was amazed at how Mr Assan has changed the inside! The first thing that I noticed was the sign saying ‘Office and Library’. Last time I was here Mr Assan used his front room as the staffroom, office, meeting place and sometimes a classroom. Now he has built a small room on the corner of the old Nursery classroom which contains a desk, seats and two large shelving units with books and learning equipment, most of which have come from Trellech! The most impressive part and the bit that jumped out at me straight away was the enormous amount of brightly coloured pictures, maps, and posters and the many photographs of the children in RG5 which I brought last year. The ‘National Curriculum in Wales’ book sits on Mr Assan’s desk right next to the Malawi National Curriculum and he uses them to show new parents and visitors what the teachers in the school will be teaching the children.

Mr Assan was keen to give me a tour of the school. It is quite incredible to see how many things he has changed. He has knocked down nearly all the classrooms and built four new bigger rooms. The new rooms are 3 metres wide and 5 metres long and look much bigger and brighter than all of the rooms that were here last year. He has very clear plans for the school and will soon be building new classrooms on each side of the school grounds.

Today was a big day which Mr Assan has been looking forward to. With the money that I was able to bring from Trellech, I went with Mr Assan to Lilongwe Market to buy 14 pieces of glass for the new classroom windows as well as all the screws and hinges for them and the new doors which a carpenter will attach later in the afternoon. These materials were heavy to carry back on the minibus but from tomorrow the teachers will be able to close the classroom windows when it is windy and rainy and shut and lock the door at night! The pieces of glass cost 150 Kwacha (75p) each and the second hand door handles with locks cost 1500 Kwacha each (£7.50). Remember that the school charges £1 per child each month for them to come to the school!

Last November, you might remember me telling you that inspectors from the Malawian Education Department visited the school and closed part of it. This is because they said that new toilets must be made, new furniture was needed, a new qualified teacher was needed (they said that at least half of teachers in the school must be officially qualified – the problem is that Mr Assan can only afford to pay the teachers £15 per month and qualified teachers can earn a little more money at government schools). The other problem was that they said that his house was too close to the classrooms and should be in the corner of the school grounds not in the middle. The main problem was the size of the classrooms. It’s very clear to see that Mr Assan has done a great deal of work to improve many of these areas already. Because he was only allowed to use some of the classrooms, he only has 4 classes at the moment, Nursery, Reception, and then basically Years 1 and 2. In time he will be able to reopen to junior aged children when he has completed the other facilities.

I talked to a lot of the children today and in the next couple of days I will take lots of photographs of them, play games with them (I want to teach them cricket and rugby using the new team bands that I brought) and work with the teachers and show them how we teach maths and English in Trellech Primary School.

 Tuesday 9th March

Today I had breakfast and tried to connect to the internet to send some emails about work but I could not connect. This concerns me because I have done lots of work this week on finding the fastest internet link in Lilongwe and decided that here at my hotel was as good as I could get. In the UK our broadband access in school and in most people’s homes uses high speed cable which allows very fast transfer of information. Here older copper wires are used which has a slower transfer rate. Even at the British High Commission (like an embassy) their speed is the same as here. On Thursday morning I will be linking back to Monmouthshire County Council’s Headteachers’ Meeting in Cwmbran using a video link and webcam. Then  on Friday, I hope to link back to RG5’s classroom live from here. At the moment there is a good chance that we will not be able to connect or that it will be very jumpy and poor quality sound and video. We’ll see.

I left for Old Town to get a minibus to Yankho School at 8am. It was the usual colourful, bumpy journey. It makes me laugh quite often – almost everybody here seems to have a mobile phone. Just like at home, people answer their phone when it rings by saying, “Hello, where are you?” I have a Malawian SIM card which I use in my phone to contact Mr Assan and some of the other people I have been working with over here. I arrived at school and Mr Assan and I discussed our plan for the day. I spent some time talking to the teachers and watching their lessons. Each class now has a clear timetable and most lessons are taught by subjects. You can always hear one of the classes chanting the alphabet or tables. Mr Assan has asked me to work with the teachers and try to show them how to get the children really active in their learning. This is what many of the teaching materials will be useful for. Rather than just practising counting numbers to ten, children can now use the counters that Trellech provided to add numbers…or perhaps the dice which I also brought which could be added together to learn number bonds. The only limit is the teachers’ imagination and Mr Assan is keen for them to make learning both fun and memorable after what he said he saw at Trellech when he visited last year.

Later in the morning we headed off for what turned out to be an amazing experience. In the last few weeks back in Trellech, I have been working with some of the children on recording interviews with Rev. Sandra, Dr. Christmas and PC Holder. We asked them questions about their job and their role in the local community. The children in Malawi have enjoyed looking at these videos. One of my tasks this week is to record videos with a Malawian vicar, a doctor and a police officer and ask the same questions so that we can see the similarities and differences between these important jobs in both our countries. Yesterday afternoon I visited the main police station in Lilongwe to try to set up an interview later in the week. Of course, it was not that easy! We explained who we were to the officer at the front desk who then told someone else and then we were shown through to the Station Officer in another room. Eventually just when I thought she would say ‘yes, OK’ she said that we would have to apply in writing to the Inspector General at the National Police Headquarters which is in the other side of the city. So last night I wrote the letter (by hand because there is no printer available). We went to the Police Headquarters and explained what we were there for to the officer at the front gate. Eventually he allowed us in and we went to the front desk and explained. After a short while we were led to another room where we explained and were then led to another room…..you get the idea. After 6 stops (yes 6!) we entered another room. Like all the others there were police men sitting around in old armchairs just watching the world go by. The rooms had windows and were very old-fashioned with not much furniture and quite a lot of files stored in cardboard boxes. You could say that it was like watching a seventies film. Eventually the man at the desk stood up and told us to go through the door, which we did and it occurred to me quite quickly that this quite untidy office belonged to the man behind the large wooden desk. He was a large man with a lot of stars on his shoulder. Again we explained why we were here. He listened, checked his mobile phone occasionally, asked me if I liked Malawi then said, “OK you can go now” and pointed to the door. We thanked him and headed out. The man in the suit said ‘sit there again please’ so we did. I asked one of the officers who the gentleman that we had just met was and he told me “The Chief,” I asked if he was the ‘big chief’ and he replied, “Yes, he is the Commissioner of Police for Malawi!” Our request for a 5 minute interview on video with an officer in Lilongwe asking 4 simple questions which children in Trellech had thought up had to be agreed by the head of the Malawian Police Force! Wait until I tell PC Holder in Monmouth! When Mr Assan visited us in Trellech in October, Holly & Harry’s dad Mr Thorpe kindly agreed to show us around the police station where he works in Newport; in Malawi we had to go to the Commissioner! Amazing!

After this we dropped off the letter of agreement at the Lilongwe Police Station and hope to go there on Friday morning with some children from Yankho School. We returned to the school in the township and I showed Mr Assan the latest load of play and learning equipment from Trellech. Most children had finished the school day and gone home but a few remained. They are always curious of Mr King the white man (there are not too many white people in Lilongwe and they never need to go into Area 23) and before too long there are always little faces looking round the door curiously. I showed Mr Assan the cafe set, the cricket sets and then the soft toys and finger puppets. We went outside and I showed them how to play cricket. The children loved it and I was really surprised by how good their coordination was with the cricket bat even though they had never seen one before and often held it like a tennis racquet. Their catching was good too. I then showed them the musical instruments which they LOVED! Within moments the 8 remaining children had taken all the instruments and were walking round banging and shaking them excitedly. This was a great moment!

I have spoken with Mr Assan about how safe the area around the school is for young children playing alone. He says that he feels that people look after each other and the children feel safe and happy. He believes that the area is 98% safe – we talked about how in Britain, parents often feel nervous about letting their children play out of sight. Lilongwe feels safe, Area 23 feels safe though I remember Mr Assan telling me last time that it would not be sensible to walk around after dark – he said that even he wouldn’t do that. With that in mind I headed back to my hotel at 5pm. The journey cost 50 Kwacha tonight (25p) though I got a 20K (10p) refund because the driver decided to stop and turn round about ¼ mile from the final bus stop – Bargain!

 Wednesday 10th March

I’m starting to get into the routine of waking up with my alarm, having breakfast then heading off for the bus to school. Ironically if my car is not fixed by Tuesday, that might be what I will be doing back in Wales too! I wish I could record what I see through my eyes rather than just with the video camera. There are people everywhere and they notice everything. It would be rude and pretty silly to walk around a place like Lilongwe with a video camera. I have quite a bit of video to show when I return and quite a few sounds that I have recorded on the school MP3 recorder however I thought I’d try to describe the journey.

Along the side of the tarmac road is just a strip of dirt which is dry and dusty. Unfortunately there is a lot of litter on the streets of the city. It makes Mr Assan cross as he says people do not respect their city and just throw their rubbish on the floor. At the side of the busy streets are people sitting on the mud selling things. Some sell eggs, others sell sachets of lemon syrup, there are quite a few people selling cassava (root vegetables – a bit like sweet potato) and others sell empty jam jars to store things in. Others sell sweets; simply a box of assorted sweets which are spread out and which you can buy one or two of for 5 kwacha (2p) each. Other people sell carrier bags and it’s quite common to see a person sitting down, bare foot, selling a pair of shoes. Lilongwe is a poor city. There are only a few beggars though and no-one hassles you or approaches you to buy what they are selling. In the mornings you pass a few bicycles and on some of them are hung about 20 chickens. Their feet are tied up and they hang down from the handle bars. When I looked closely this morning I noticed that they are all alive but obviously on their way from the market. It’s also not unusual to see someone at the side of the road holding a chicken. They raise their arms and hold the chicken up when a car or van passes hoping it will stop & someone will buy it! At Old Town bus depot there are usually about 100 minibuses which seem quite randomly parked yet if you can’t find a bus for Area 23, anyone can point you to the next one that is due to depart! As you wait for it to leave (and this can take up to 30 minutes), a number of people walk up to the bus holding up anything from newspapers to samosas to sweets to ice blocks. No one ever seems to buy them but they always return each day.

At school I worked with another class this morning and talked to them about our school and about our Green Flag. I showed them some of the pictures on our website (I printed them out) and talked about all the work we do each week to ‘keep the school green’. It’s quite funny that now in Trellech, we do these things automatically, we do the things we do in an ‘eco-friendly’ way each day. Children seemed to understand but I was careful not to sound like I was criticising the way they live their lives. I have been surprised by the number of low-energy light bulbs that are used in Lilongwe although there are no lights or power in the Yankho classrooms.

Mr Assan & I spent a long time talking about future projects for our pupils to share. I think the children at Yankho have learned a great deal from us in Trellech over the last 2 years and I think that Trellech children have learned a huge amount about Yankho, Malawi and Africa. But the real challenge for the future is to share learning and understanding on a particular topic that is meaningful to both sets of children. There are difficulties too because the children mainly speak Chichewa and their English is really very weak. Also, at the moment, the oldest children in the school are 7 years old so there are not any older children who could understand and share thoughts on pollution, sustainability and environmental issues. I have a thought that a shared topic on water would be useful. For example we take water for granted in Trellech both in school and at home. We are used to having hot and cold water. In fact if there is a problem with water at Trellech, I am supposed to close the school until it is fixed. I’d be interested to hear what you think about this idea (children) – let me know on the ‘Got a Question’ button. At Yankho there is a tap outside Mr Assan’s back door – that’s it. No sink, no bath, no shower, no flushing toilet, no dish washer, no washing machine and also no hot water. This morning I watched in the litter filled ditch at the side of the road in Old Town as a man climbed in, cupped his hands and drank the water to cool himself down. Be honest now, have you ever refused to share a drink with your brother or sister in case you ‘get germs?!’

So far we have done a lot of shared work; this week of course we are looking at our local communities and are completing videos with a police officer, doctor and vicar as we did in Trellech. The children have been learning about how important it is to eat healthily and to try to eat ‘5 A Day’. This started when Mr Assan visited us in October and liked the posters about healthy eating. It’s great to think that what we teach children in our school is having a real difference to the lives of children in Malawi. I have also talked to the children about the work we have done since Christmas on healthy lunchtimes and ‘food as fuel’. Mr Assan now uses a lot of our Welsh documents and books to organise his classes and the way they learn. In addition this week I am taking pictures of ‘Homes in Lilongwe’, ‘Food in Lilongwe’, ‘Weather in Lilongwe’ and a ‘Day in the life of a Yankho Pupil’ as we did with Richard in RG1 recently and to go with the books I made up and brought with me on the other topics. Lots of learning so far – still time to plan further chances. I think the next step should be to bring other teachers from Trellech to Yankho but until now we have not been able to apply for this funding from the British Council. After my return we will enter ‘stage 3’ of our partnership and we can apply for more money to exchange teachers.

This afternoon, on the way back to the hotel, I met a man who works in the hotel restaurant and he had a car that he had borrowed. I had been speaking to him the other day about Madonna. If you don’t know, she is a very famous & rich pop star who loves Malawi. She has adopted two Malawian orphans and gives a lot of money to help the children here. I heard that she was planning to build a school here and very kindly, Nelson said he’d show me where the school site is. We travelled towards the airport and I saw a sign for ‘Raising Malawi’ the charity that Madonna set up. We spoke to the gate guard and he let us drive in. Around the corner was the large site which workers have started to develop. It’s still early days but I spoke to Adji the project manager and he explained where the football pitch and athletics track would be then where the main school and dormitories would be built. He had a meeting recently with Madonna at the site and she said where she wanted everything to go! The school is just for girls and is around 5 miles outside the city. I can’t wait to see on the news when it is finished and opened!

Back at the hotel I tried to link up to Miss Foster so that we can test the internet link before (hopefully) having a video chat with the class tomorrow afternoon. It didn’t go well and after 20 calls which kept failing or quickly cutting out, all I saw was Miss Foster’s purple cardigan and puzzled face for about 2 seconds – just to prove it worked briefly, here’s the picture I took!

 Fingers crossed for tomorrow! Also tomorrow in the morning we are hoping to join up live by video with the Headteachers’ meeting in Cwmbran…I have big worries that this won’t work either. Internet links in Malawi are all very very slow.

 Thursday 11th March

Today I took the last load of toys and equipment to the school. Again it was the usual minibus journey to Area 23. I really enjoy the trip each morning. Today the driver had some great music playing. It was modern Malawian music – a mix between what you might think of as African drumming and reggae and a lot of the songs had words in them about Malawi. It reminded me of the ‘protest songs’ in the Year 6 Music Express book because one song was about the struggles of the people and their fight against injustice and bad leadership. From what I understand, most people here think that Dr. Bingu Matharika the president is doing quite a good job though. I was going to ask the man if I could buy the CD off him until he told me that it was actually playing from an MP3 player. This is one of the mysteries of Malawi. The people in the townships are really some of the poorest people in the world – they have almost nothing. Yet this man driving a very rickety & battered minibus with no windows, panels of metal literally hanging off, a very cracked windscreen and dust everywhere inside listens to music on an MP3 player wired up to his radio – I wouldn’t know how to do that. Also many Malawians have mobile phones, even in the most deprived areas (I can get reception with my phone using my Malawian SIM card at the school in the middle of the township, yet Vodafone can’t get to me in Trellech!

 At the school we took all of the toys and play equipment outside and placed them around the playground. It was wonderful to watch the children’s faces as they explored. The Matchbox cars were very popular and so was the wooden train set. Others went for the cricket set after I taught Mr Assan’s son how to play on Tuesday (I think). He was able to teach them and he is already doing really well. The boys really liked the doll and pushchair too. In Malawi, men do not play as big a part as dads often do in Wales – looking after  the children and running the house is considered to be the job of the mother and daughters. In fact mothers carry their babies around in a pouch on their backs and never in pushchairs – I have not seen a single pushchair in Malawi. This is probably because there are no proper footpaths and the roads and paths are all very uneven with huge potholes. It’s probably really comfortable for babies on their mums’ back as they always seem to be asleep. It is very common to see a lady with a baby strapped to her back walking along with something huge balancing on her head. Yesterday I saw this and the lady had a 1 ½ metre log balanced on her head, OK occasionally she raised a hand to balance it but still pretty impressive!

 After the play session Mr Assan & I headed to the city centre as we had a meeting arranged with a man called Gift who is one of the project officers at the British Council who helped us set up our partnership. He said that he thinks our link is very strong and he can see how children in both schools have benefitted from our shared work. I explained that I wanted to do even more for the children to understand about each other’s country and that we were working on ideas for subjects that we can both talk about & share like water and healthy eating. I know that the next step in our partnership means that more teachers can visit each others’ school, not just me so it was good to get the details from Gift.

From here we got another minibus to Old Town where we got lunch & sat on a wall to eat it (I had a Chinese spring roll and Chelsea bun – my least Malawian meal of the week!) We then came back to my hotel which seems to have the best internet signal in the whole of Lilongwe (in fact I have just managed to link up briefly with RG5 after their PE lesson with Mr Rogers. A lady called Christine from the USA came over & asked about it and I explained how to use Skype – she wants to try it so that she can speak to her mum in Manhattan, New York. I said she can use my PC tomorrow if she wants. ICT is amazing huh!) At 1.30pm Malawi time Mr Assan and I managed to have a really good 10 minute video link to the Headteachers’ conference in Cwmbran. He met Mr Keep who is the Director of Education for Monmouthshire when he was in Wales last autumn. He was really pleased to speak to him again. Tomorrow we have a really busy day and at 9.30 we are going to meet the Director of Education for Lilongwe.

After our web link we travelled back to Yankho and visited Sithe. She is a little girl in Reception at the school and she lives about ¼ mile away. We took a number of photographs for the book I/we are making. Half of the book features Sithe and half of the book shows Richard in RG1; both children are showing a day in their life in Malawi and Trellech, hour by hour. When her mum saw the book of Richard’s day she was happy for to be involved but she needed to get her husband’s permission first. Mr Assan explained that in Malawi, the husband always has to agree and always has the final decision about things in the family. I explained that it was not always like this in Britain! I think Sithe really enjoyed her moments of stardom. Afterwards all her neighbours came over to her house and asked if I could take their photograph which of course I did.

I rushed back from Area 23 after the ‘photo shoot’ so that I could try to link up with RG5 at 2.30pm, just after break. I spoke to Miss Foster, Cameron and Michael which was great and then later to the rest of the class. The sound wasn’t brilliant, the video was jumpy but at least we managed to make it happen.

That means that tonight I have a little more time to write this blog and to sort out photographs. So far this week it has usually taken about 20 minutes to upload the words to the website and about 15 minutes per picture. In my office at school it takes about 10 seconds for each of these, sometimes less. Tomorrow morning I am looking forward to meeting the Head of Lilongwe Police at the police station for the video interview that we have been planning with the children for so long. I’ll let you know how it goes.

 Friday 12th March

This morning I feel a bit tired and frustrated. Yesterday I brought Mr Assan’s laptop, the one that Trellech provided for Yankho last year, back to the hotel so that I could update his anti-virus and QuickTime software. Unfortunately he has not been able to show the children his videos of Trellech as he does not have a programme for watching videos that he needs called QuickTime (he needs this programme not Windows Media Player). However the internet was down and I could not connect from 7pm last night to at least 8.30am this morning. I stayed up late trying and got up early too. I knew that even if it had connected, downloads like this on a slow internet connection would have taken a few hours. Unfortunately I have not been able to help Mr Assan on this and that is very frustrating. In the UK this would be a very simple and routine task but here it is a huge challenge for me let alone him! Another example of how life here should be simple but can be so much harder! I went to the main police station in Lilongwe and met Mr Assan & two of his pupils and we did our police officer interview. Well I say that, after all the arrangements to get permission from the Commissioner of Police for Malawi on Tuesday, this morning it took an hour for the sergeant to ask the sub-inspector, the sub-inspector to ask the inspector, the inspector to ask the superintendent who eventually agreed that, yes, he could talk to us. The questions (which you will have heard on the interviews page with PC Holder), were very straightforward and general but the superintendent who was to answer them insisted on having precise information and so there followed another 20 minutes of him going off to ask others things like ‘the population of Lilongwe’ and the statistics for the different types of crime. I kept saying very nicely, ‘it doesn’t matter, it’s only approximate numbers’ but they insisted on being precise. The final video had really quite short, brief answers which was quite funny really after all the preparation and kerfuffle. At first the officers who proudly told me they were the third level in command of the station were quite tense and had serious faces but after a few minutes chat and lots of small talk while we waited we had a very friendly conversation often laughing and joking. They were even happy to wear Yankho’s Gwent Police helmet that Holly & Harry’s dad kindly gave to Assan when he visited last autumn. The Yankho children really enjoyed the visit and Mr Assan told me that most children (& people) are very scared of the police so this was a fantastic opportunity not only for Trellech children to learn but also for his pupils to see that Malawian police officers smile and can be kind and ‘human’. We are lucky at Trellech having PC Holder and working with PC Lewis on a regular basis. The children all know him and the happy, friendly but serious approach he has is how Trellech children see the police in general. By the end of the interview the officers were very happy, you could say keen to pose for a photograph outside the station. We seem to have made a good link between the police and Yankho School too – it might be possible in the future for Mr Assan to take children to the station for a visit…and that sort of thing just doesn’t happen at police stations in Malawi.

From here we went around the corner to the Lilongwe District Education Office and met the officer in charge. She was a very nice lady who controls all the schools in the Lilongwe area. It was very interesting to see how similar Malawi and Wales’ education systems are. Malawi used to be part of the British Empire (it’s now part of the British Commonwealth). This means that until 1964, Britain ‘controlled’ many things in the country and therefore many key areas like policing and education were based on the British way of doing them. While I waited I read a report of a recent school inspection (like ours last year) and it was amazing to see that it was laid out in a very similar way to ours in Wales – even a lot of the words and phrases were the same. I also learned that the average teacher to pupil ratio in Lilongwe’s schools is 1 (teacher) to 70 (pupils) though it is a little higher in the city’s largest primary school which has over 6000 pupils! There are two types of school in Malawi – government and private. That’s the same as in Wales, Trellech is a government (or ‘state’) school which means that we teach the National Curriculum and school is free. Yankho is a private school. It still has to have a ‘good’ curriculum but has a little more choice. In many ways private schools have to keep to the same rules as government schools however while it is free for children to go to government primary schools, parents have to pay if they choose a private school. Private schools offer much smaller classes usually though most struggle for money. Mr Assan has recently put up his school fees from £1 (200 Kwacha) to £4 (800 kwacha) per month. In Malawi secondary schools are not free and parents must pay – this is one of the reasons why many children leave school at the end of their primary years. Mr Assan said that there are many parents in Area 23 who could not afford to send their child to Yankho (£8 per month); these are the parents who cannot afford to travel by minibus (48p). He tells me that only the ‘richer’ people in the township can afford the buses, the rest walk to work and from 4am the roads are busy with people walking the 7 miles to work in Old Town. I have got a real sense this week that there is a focus on advertising and promoting school as ‘giving you the skills you need in the future’, skills of ‘self-reliance’ as a number of school signs I have seen say. People seem to be realising that education is the key to improvement and development and that parents really should do all they can to make sure they send their children to school.

After a quick snack (I had a mango today!) we returned to Area 23 with the children for our next interview, with a doctor at one of the clinics. I had expected to see a small, hot room with tens of people crowded and in all very unwell. As it happened there were 3 people waiting and the place had a very calm feel. A man was lying on a bed with a drip attached to his arm and the first thing that I noticed was a big cardboard box nearby that had ‘HIV Care’ written on it. The doctor welcomed us and showed us into his surgery. It was a simple room with a bed and table and scales. It didn’t look very clean. I was shocked by his answer to question two when he said that around 80% of people who come to see him are sick with malaria. (You’ll have to watch the video interview for the rest – I can’t do that until I get home but it’ll be on the interview page).

Our next stop was to the area pastor (vicar). He lived around 1 mile from the school and because the temperature today was 95 degrees, we decided to catch a bus. He pastor looks after 6 churches in his district or parish (Rev Sandra looks after two in Trellech and Penallt). The interesting answer this time came when he told us that on average he sees over 600 people in his main church for each service!

After leaving the pastor’s home we headed back to Yankho School. I took some final video of the school and developments and also spoke to the teachers as Mr Assan had asked me to. I showed them how they can use counters, dice and dolls to help the children learn to count, measure, add and sort as well as talking about how important it is for children to play and learn outside of the classroom. It is very hard to ‘show them the teaching and learning approaches we use at Trellech’ in ten minutes but I had a go and  think the teachers knew what I was talking about….though I am not completely convinced….I only hope that the teachers at Trellech don’t think that on our Wednesday afternoon staff meetings!

This might be my last blog as I leave tomorrow night and internet access is supposed to be even worse at the weekend! If I can get a connection in Addis Ababa as I stop in Ethiopia I will write a quick note but I’m only there for 4 hours between flights and as is common in Africa, a lot of that will involve queuing and waiting in a line. Otherwise I’ll see everyone back at school on Tuesday. Thank you for surfing onto this page & making the long hours of typing and uploading worthwhile – I hope you have enjoyed learning more about Malawi, Lilongwe and our partner school Yankho Elementary. What are YOUR thoughts about Malawi and Yankho?