First week teaching 12th to 19th September

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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 (verb) and can (noun). One of these he pronounced cannay, and the other kennay. I don't know which was which, I was losing the will to live as fast as the chiidren were. Anyway, today I met with the Head teacher and have got agreement that we can use the text but plan different activities round it. To start with I want to check the children understand any of the nouns, let alone the whole text.
I've invited children over to the library and read them stories and played lotto language games. They came back the next day, with friends.
School starts at 7.30am,but I'm awake by 5.30 when it starts getting light. Several days this week I walked down to the tea shop, to get a cup of tea. It's Malawian tea - boiled milk, (one day i saw the farmer pouring the milk straight from his metal churn into the bucket) and water poured through a sieve of powdered tea into a plastic cup. It costs 100 kwachas (12p) and it's fairly sociable as I greet everyone on the way there. George, the building site manager took me there on my first day as most of the builders go there. The men sit in the front on benches, the women sit in the back on a rush mat. There are a couple of bars open in the evening, but they are men only. Shelby (the American Peace Corps volunteer who I'm sharing a house with) and I are thinking of setting up a women's cafe, where the women sit on the benches and we may let a few men in if they are infirm and need to sit on a bench. And we'll have women only dancing.
Today we went to M'bang'ombe market which is the social highlight of the week. We wanted winnowing basket lids to hang from the ceiling for storage. There weren't any but we each bought a length of material for a chitenje (tie round skirt). I'm going to try and have mine made into a top. We got a lift there from the Landirani CEO, Heather, who arrived from the UK today, but had to walk back a kilometre or two down the hill, across the river and up the hill. We met many people on their way to the market, dressed up in finery, and wanting to greet us. Many of them know Shelby well, she has been working in Health in M'bang'ombe for 18 months, and speaks Chichewan pretty well. She's lent me her language course and dictionary.
Yesterday she taught me how to light a fire, and I have now lit four successfully. Each morning we boil water to fill two flasks for tea, and light another one for the evening meal. Both Shelby and Steve (a builder friend of Heather's who has come to repair the maternity unit) are good cooks, so we're eating well.
Wednesday Steve drove us into Lumbardzi, the local town about 8 kms away, and we bought fresh vegetables.dirts 4 or 5 kms before we get to tarmac. Shelby normally takes a bicycle taxi there for 500 kwacha. That'll be an experience on the dirt roads.
We had the most enormous spider, that Shelby stamped on. I didn't see it clearly alive, as iit was dark, but when it wad dead it was spread across a pretty wide area. Shelby says she doesn't see many of them, only about four a week, and they're only slightly poisonous. She says you can hear them at night walking on the metal that lines the edges of the dirt floor (this stops the termites from climbing the walls and eating the roof joists). After this conversation I started tucking my mosquito net under the mattress instead of letting it hang to the floor. I had been only thinking of preventing mosquitos getting to me, I hadn't thought of spiders big enough to have pattering feet.
Saturday 19th
Last night I saw a creature in the corner of my bedroom. I moved a box and something scuttled. By the time I'd recovered myself, ensured I had an escape route, and moved a few more boxes it had completely disappeared. In the night, it came back. I could hear scurrying, scratching, and pattering. Every time I shone my torch round (from inside the safety of the mosquito net) the noises stopped. I managed to go back to sleep, but dreamt about quantities of huge cockroaches, pouring out of a rucksack, waving antennae and trailing feathery tail fronds. I wish I hadn't slept in till 7.30.
We have many more mod cons here than last year. The solar panels that were put in now run lights in every house and we have electrical points so we can charge things. Instead of having to get water from the borehole at the top of the site, two huge water tanks are set on a brick-built tower, with its own solar panel pumping water from the borehole to standpipes dotted round the site, one of which is 4 metres from our back door. It's very convenient, but Shelby says she misses the morning gossip with the village women in the queue at the pump. The pipes aren't dug deep into the ground so if I want a warm wash, by mid afternoon water drawn straight from the tap is pretty hot.
The loo is a long-drop pit, but it has a bench seat, built last year for two Aidcampers with bad backs who were struggling to squat. The hand wash is a 'tip tap', an ingenious system of plastic water bottles. One contains water and a small hole at the top and is hung from the roof rafters of the loo. It has a counter balance of another bottle filled with sand or gravel. One taps this with one's foot, (to avoid cross contamination), and the water-filled bottle tips up, and you get a thin stream of water. The soap hangs under the top half of another bottle, (so it doesn't get washed away in the rainy season). The whole lot is strung together with linea, thin strips of tyre rubber that pretty much holds everything together. Shelves are hung from nails in the walls or under cupboards with linea; each thatch bundle is tied to the cross beams of the rafters with it.
Yesterday we set a table up in the cooking area. The mbala, the clay pot that we make the fire in, sits on the ground, and whoever is cooking sits on a box or bucket beside it. The whole garden area is fenced round with bamboo so we can sunbathe, or hang out our smalls with impunity, as well as getting some protection from the wind that often sweeps across. The table will be useful to have in the kitchen prep area by the fire. Otherwise we have a picnic table under a bamboo screen. This doubles as our office and dining area.
One is very close to the necessities of life here. What can't be composted must be burned, and yesterday we burned our plastics, and today I'm feeling the effects in my sunuses, especially as on Thursday I was helping Steve refurbish aitposo ernity unit as the school was shut because of a visiting US ambassador. I was digging out old render from beside rickety door frames, and sweeping up the resultant dust.
Saturday 20th September
This morning we having the Chikota village equivalent of a day up in town. We've come to the airport. Here we have the internet, proper flushing toilets, tables and chairs, a restaurant, cold drinks from a fridge, tiled floors - in short everything that is luxurious. I feel as if I'm in Harrods. We took a bicycle taxi each, 350 kwacha (about 40p), along the 5 or so kilometres of dirt track to the back gate of the airport. On the way we passed a large group of guhle wankhule (traditional dancers and entertainers in masks and dress). I was pleased that Gerard, my taxi driver driver called out, 'We're coming through', and the men parted and let us through. The day before when we met a group of guhle wankhule on the road, Shelby said we ought to go to the side of the road and not look at them. Traditionally they are entertainers in costume and character and tell old folk stories, but apparently more recently young men have been incorporated into the group, and behave like young men do when people show fear. It went against every grain in my body to act as if I was fearful. 'I am gogo,' I wanted to say (the term for elder or grandparent), and if some young man was going to try to intimidate me by standing tall with his hands on his hips, and his legs straddled, I wanted to reflect his stance back to him. Elders are respected here, and it's only for children to be frightened.
Sam's Village, where I'm living was originally started by the Landirani Trust (or African Vision) to help build an area for three poor villages to feed their Aids orphans, and develop permaculture. They were then given a huge influx of funds from a director of Sunbird Hotels, whose son had committed suicide. This director wanted a lasting memorial of his son,Sam, and now this area is being developed into a training village to train local people initially, and then house people from otnrtarrad who want to come and be trained. The buildings are in rammed earth, and will provide workshops for training all types of the building profession, as well as permaculture, and other skills.
One of the areas I want to work on with the Standard 8 learners is about the skills demonstrated in this village. Standard 8 will leave school at the end of this academic year JuneJuly, and very few of them will go onto secondary school. They will need some sort of job, so I want to work towards them interviewing the skilled workmen on the site about the job they are doing, the skills and tools required, and encouraging them to think about getting trained in some profession or trade. The Head teacher, and Standard 8 teacher like the idea, as does George, the building site manager, so we're set to roll.

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