Last week teaching part 2

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Lsst week teaching part 2
I'm trying to get everything finished before I leave. I'm providing a lunch for the main workers, the Landirani team from the office, and the staff of the school. Chicken, rice and nsima, cabbage, squash to drink, and an apple to finish. That will be on Tuesday, so Irene, the assistant librarian and I will go into Lumbadzi on Monday; hopefully I can take the truck. I have driven it before, but only on the dirt road, but it’s no bigger than my van.
Thursday morning I'm up early so go and wait for the woodman. He passes each morning before 6am with the back of his bike piled high with sticks of firewood. Unfortunately Bear's friend Lion sees me and attacks my skirt, (I'm wearing a nightie with a long skirt over the top) and by the time I've extricated myself the woodman is up the road. I start running after him, and cadge a lift with someone who is passing on a bike. As I'm not wearing trousers I sit side saddle - it's quite difficult to get your balance and I wonder if we'll take a tumble. We don't; we catch the woodman up a kilometre up the road, and I buy some bundles of wood. The track is quite busy at this time. I meet men on bikes going to work, see women in the fields hoeing the straight furrows ready for planting in the rains, four men with a bullock cart loading the huge trunk of a hewn tree, chickens crossing the road. It's an open road, away from the village up to crossroads, where several new houses are being built, making a new community round the bar, which has sprung up since last year. It is fenced round with bamboo fencing, and loud music is often played, though not at that hour of the morning.

Shelby and I made two tip-tappy hand washing stations for the new loos; the rock has to be heavy enough to pull the water bottle back upright after its been tipped, and the sand bottle has to be sturdy enough to stand upright when tipped. The loos are very swish, plastic and glass bottles set in the walls let in light, up stairs and all with seats and lids.

Thursday the children weren't in school, there was a head count at M'bang'ombe. I wanted to take a photo of the briquette maker with labels of the separate parts so I rounded up a few random children; they always respond to a ,’jambalaya’ (picture), then I went off to Lumbadzi to get the photos printed, the typed up sheets of the briquette making process printed and the whole lot laminated. Of course, as is the usual process with technology and me, things are never that simple. The internet cafe struggled to open the document as it was done in a weird system on my laptop, (Libre Office Writer). The guy had to transfer it into another document to get it printed. Then I found out that not only one of the photos I'd taken hadn't come out so I would have to come back to the village to retake it, but also there is nowhere to print colour photos in Lumbadzi, so I would have to go into Lilongwe.
Several stressed hours later after two photo shops, a balls up and an overcharging which I'd lost the stamina to complain about, I left a shop in tears hoping the staff would feel bad enough to have as bad a day as I was having. At first I thought I'd have to go back into Lilongwe again the next day to finish off the job, but then realised the laminating could be done in Lumbadzi. At least it's giving a good income to the cabanzas (bike taxis).
Friday morning I'm up at 5 am, the school bell seems to ring earlier each day, and I'm preparing the sheets I need to get laminated. A group from Standard 7 drew the separate parts of the briquette maker and wrote up the process, which Chikondi and I had already typed, but I decided it would be nice to cut out the pictures the children had drawn, and stick them on the instructions. So I chose three children's pictures and such them on each of the sheets. It's lovely working outside at 6am in a lovely comfortable temperature. At that time there is rarely any wind, though later on on the afternoon the wind sends me indoors as paper is flying all over the place.
My bike taxi rider arrives at 8 am and we go to Lumbadzi, and are back by 10 ish.
The class and teachers are impressed by the brickmaking, and each of Standard 7 takes home a brick to try out.
The rest of the day is taken up with sorting. I leave here in five days, and I still have a lot to do.
Precis
Standards 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 have each made alphabet charts, an A4 sheet for each letter, coloured and labeled with the English word in large letters, and the Chichewa word in small letters. George is still not back yet with the boards for them to go on, so I'm hoping that will happen before I leave. I did want it to happen early enough to encourage the teachers to use them. The intention is that underneath each sheet is a blank laminated sheet so that when they use any English word, it can be written on the appropriate sheet. They can read the words, translate them into Chichewa, or put them in a sentence.
Standard 2 had the Very Hungry Caterpillar with an activity of making the sentences, and drawing what the caterpillar ate.

Standard 3, 4 and 5
Read an African book called Counting Chickens, similar to Hungry Caterpillar in that each day an increasing number of things happened. We also played the lotto game which involves things you wear, eat, or play with. We also looked at the Char Char Trust dictionary.

Standard 6
I had started of teaching with the class teacher but this proved problematic so at the end I took groups put and they read in pairs the Three Billy Goats Gruff as a play. I had typed this up so that each pair had a copy of their part.

Standard 7
I'd started working with the teacher on adjectives with them and we did quite a bit of dictionary work, buy at the end we did the brick making and added to the Sam's Village booklet.

Standard 8
I worked with the teacher at the beginning but when he was working on English grammar I gave up, I can't do that! The only thing I did with them was with 16 of them questioning the builders and Loness (the nursing student).

All of the kids come to the library and spent some looking at the books.

Pre school
Gave them some equipment (finger puppets, 4-piece puzzles) and them how to use some equipment I was leaving in the library.

Listed teachers materials I've left in the library. Helped Chikondi start a book group and will start an art group tomorrow though once again the children are going to some sporting event at M'bang'ombe.
I have a hotspot bundle (get me! Courtesy of Shelby) so I'm sending this from the village, while we're cooking a meal.





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