Blogs from Malawi, Africa - page 11

It's interesting being on my own. I live on my own at home, but I watch some TV pretty much every day. Here there's no TV, and I only have my iPod. While i was making some equipment a while ago, i plugged myself in and danced to it, but mostly just doing household chores and teaching seems to take all my time. I haven't even read a book since I've been here, I play a few rounds of Words with Friends (solo play) on my tablet and then I'm falling asleep.This last weekend I listened to my iPod again and something seems to have happened to it. Both earpieces are working, but Dolly Parton sounds as if her band and chorus are in the room with me, but she herself is at the end of ... read more

The week ending 16th October On Monday I met Libertina, the girl I'm supporting through secondary school. She's in Shelby's girls empowerment group, so I went along for the beginning of the session. She's a very smiley, confident girl. She says she'd like to go to university after school. Thursday was a public holiday for mother's day, so ad the school was shut I went with Steve to the maternity hospital. He was tiling the birthing room, and I painted the skirting board in the maternity ward, which meant I was on my knees for about four hours. Priscilla, the cleaner who also helps with nursing, watched me intently for a while, then asked if she could have a go. I showed her how as she had never painted before - paint is so expensive so ... read more

Fourth week teaching Sunday Shelby and I went into Lilongwe to go to an Indian food festival at the safari or woodland park. Unfortunately we should have got tickets beforehand, it was ticket only and they didn't sell them on the door. As we were in the mood for Indian food we hitched into the main town to Sana, near the old town shopping complex. The guys that picked us were very chatty, and not until Shelby asked what they did, did they mention they were a taxi cab. Shelby is very good at deflecting requests for payment, saying that we had no money, which was why we were hitching and we wouldn't have accepted a lift if we had thought we had to pay. She's also good at deflecting requests for her phone number, and ... read more

Second week Last blog I said few of the learners went onto secondary school.I was wrong. Out of 38 who took the exams, 34 passed. Only 2 went to the higher level boarding schools, and this number the school want to improve on this year. There is a drop out rate, which I don't know. The younger classes have 90 or so learners in, so to have 38 in last year's standard 8 suggests more than half may have dropped out. Yesterday we started thinking about questions to ask the builders in my first Standard 8 group. None of them are used to showing any initiative yet; if you ask them to write three facts about themselves they freeze, so I asked specific questions to start them off. Then in pairs they could do it. For ... read more

First week teaching. Friday 18th September This week I've been observing in three classes of English lessons in Standards 6, 7 and 8 (age 11ish upwards). The curriculum is very formal, (think 1950's) complicated text with comprehension and grammar exercises, many of them unrelated to the text and all of them seemingly above the comprehension of most of the children, or learners. One poor man was desperately following the standard 6 textbook instructions and trying to get the children to understand and hear the difference between import (verb) and import (noun), refuse ('say no' and 'rubbish') - though he pronounced them the same) as he did desert ('place' and 'abandon'). The teacher's book added an example of a waiter asking a customer to choose a 'desert'. Next day the lesson was on the difference between can ... read more