We woke up to a dark and gloomy Malawi. We enjoyed a lovely breakfast of rice porridge (a traditional Malawi food) accompanied by monkeys thundering on the roof and playing in the trees. Some of us (“the advanced party” in Miss Bournon’s words) left at 7.45 because of our slow nature, and luckily just missed the downpour. Unfortunately, the rest of the arrived 10 minutes later completely drenched!! Our first lesson started like every other day, with our group of small children. We taught the children different animals in English through repetition and drawing. This was a great succsess until during a running game a little boy was sick all over the floor and himself sending our well planned lesson into chaos. After half a hour the teacher sent in 2 of the students to clear up the mess. Some of us felt this was unfair and upsetting but this seemed to be normal for Malawi. The students were repaid with gifts from us for their cleaning. Dispite this hiccup the students still left the room with happy faces.
After a quick snack break, it was ready to teach the standard 2 class English and Physics. The children quickly picked up word classes and really enjoyed the game we incorporated. In between changing from English to some Physics, we took the children outside where they sang us one of their songs, where each student danced in the middle of the circle including us. It was a very uplifting and special moment.
During our standard 7 lesson we taught the structure of the body when we were rudely interrupted by a chicken wandering through the room and exiting out the window. We found this lesson very sucsessful because by the end the children where reciting the different body parts confidently. Job well done team!
Lessons finished for the day, it was then time for a stroll back down the hill with swarms of happy children holding our hands. We were greet at butterfly space with hearty chapatti’s made the the FAWNS (Fighting Aids With Nutrition, a groups of HIV positive people who have started a business to get healthy food). They were very tasty. At 2 o’clock it was time for the second play group of the week where Whiteside and Gooldie were the biggest kids there.
