Visitors to Fulirwa!

I honestly can’t remember what I updated you on last time so I am sorry if I repeat myself here! Malawi has turned me into the most forgetful person ever!!

This week has been an interesting one with our first visitor on Wednesday. Alison, who is an American volunteer at Maji Zuwa, came to give a talk to our Form 1 girls about women’s empowerment. The girls are very shy in class and lag behind the boys in most subjects so Alison came to talk to them specifically. The results she got were amazing; they completely opened up to her and told her some pretty personal information. They said that they thought the boys always talked too much and believed that boys were planning on how to get them pregnant – which is quite a scary opinion held by 14 year old girls. Alison also interviewed Anthony and me about the state of female education in Malawi which she will use for her dissertation back in the US. It was great to have a visitor finally, the kids went mad for her and the school was in a constant state of excitement for the whole day (particularly the boys!!). We showed her round the area, not that there is much to see, and she seemed amazed how rural the place was describing it as “literally in the middle of nowhere”. I showed off my culinary skills by making soya curry with Bombay potatoes and then a chocolate cake for dessert! All the teachers seemed to be amazed by her as well as the students even though they had a female Peace Corps volunteer recently.

We have just found out that in a weeks time we will be off school once more… this time due to exams. Fulirwa has a big problem, once the government exams start there isn’t allowed to be any teaching within a 100 metre radius – all our school buildings are within 100m. The headteacher has tracked down one church that can be used as a classroom for the two weeks but obviously the Form 4’s, who have important exams, are given priority! Neither of us teach form 4 and so we won’t have any classes for the duration of the exams. At the moment I really don’t know what I am going to do during that time, Anthony is planning to learn to scuba-dive but that is quite expensive (and I have my eyes on an Oxford United season ticket when I get back home). I may try and volunteer at one of Matt’s many projects or go to another placement and see if I can teach there. Whatever I do the holiday means that we only have 2 full weeks of teaching left – just 34 lessons that is!! When we come back from the holiday we will just have 1 week to prepare our classes before their end of term exams, which I am dreading already. My maths class is so far behind it’s untrue, whatever I do just seems to take twice as long as it should do.

A quick thank you to Miss McGuiness’ year 9 class at Ryde Academy who replied to the email my Form 3’s sent. The students have been busy typing up a reply about the local area, what animals you can find and their local culture. Even just getting one email from England has made them very excited and a lot want the students addresses now!! The typing is still painfully slow and I feel that this is the only computer that they will ever use which is pretty incredible if you think about it. I have also been teaching the headteacher how to use his computer, showing him the basics of Word and Excel. He can now type up an exam on his computer with very good formatting and he is much quicker than the students at typing! Last weekend I bought the Head an Airtel Dongle so he can connect to the internet – something that he has always been trying to do. I sat patiently with his computer for 2 hours trying to connect to the internet but as ever Airtel is terrible (Airtel is something I definitely won’t miss when I leave Malawi). We still haven’t managed to connect him to the internet and I am not sure whether it is due to back coverage or a fault at Airtel’s side. I just really hope to get him online soon as he wants to use the internet for research as he hopes to go to the University of Livingstonia next year.

Whilst I was helping the headteacher with his computer I noticed there were a load of kids in his house all working hard. After inspection I found around 30 children shelling maize – such incredible amounts of maize! The Head owns some farm land and has just harvested his maize, he hopes to get 50 bags of 50kg worth of maize. He will apparently keep 30 of them for his family which will last the whole year and sell the remaining 20 bags for around K4,000 each (10GBP). He also grows rice on his fields but due to the lack of rain only 10% of his crops will be fully grown. The rice is much more profitable, selling at K6,000 for 20 litres and therefore he converted more of his fields to rice which has lost him a lot of money this year around – lets hope for a lot of rain next year! He is using a whole house to shell the maize with kids sitting in on floor in a bundle of the stuff. I went in with my camera and caused chaos as the children run here and there trying to get in shot. The headteacher is paying them K30 for each 20 litres they shell.

Also there has been more news with the Malawian Kwacha. The government have printed brand new notes that are completely different and everyone in the country has just 3 weeks to change all their notes to the new system. I have just seen the notes and they are so amazing – about 3 times small than previously and now they have different people on each note. They remind me a lot of Monopoly money and also look a lot like Zambian Kwacha. With the news of the recent devaluation most things in Malawi have gone up in price… a minibus from here to Mzuzu now costs K1,600 instead of K1,300 but it’s still much cheaper for me as I was paying over 5 quid for the minibus where now I just pay 4GBP!

The usual Malawi...

So again I am in Mzuzu with a little update... only 7 weeks left in the country!!

Over one weekend we decided to climb up to Rakesh and Claus’s house which is on top of Livingstonia and meant a 4 hour hike up the mountain. The trek was good fun and there was some great rock climbing parts once you got off the road and onto the shortcuts. But hiking for 4 hours in 30 degree heats is tricky and I don’t think I have ever sweated that much in my life – I drunk 1.5 litres of water and yet I was still dehydrated once I got to the top. Luckily Rakesh and Claus have a shower which was very welcomed and we spent the night at their house with 9 other volunteers crashing on their floor to save money! The next day they took us to see the Manchewe Waterfalls which were very impressive and we got to go to a cave that the falls went over! Unfortunately Anthony and myself had to go back down the mountain, little over 24 hours since we came up but this time we got a lift for about half way down!

Also on 1^st of May we had a day off to celebrate Labour Day which was great timing as it coincided with the big match Man City v Man Utd! So we popped down to Hara with a couple of others to a small bar to watch the game. The “room” was a small shack, covered by a grass roof and was only about 15 by 10 foot! To say it was packed is an understatement as there were men everywhere, all sitting on wooden stalls to get a view of the 2 small portable TVs at the front of the room. There must have been 200-400 people in there and to my surprise about 75% of them were supporting City! The atmosphere was perhaps the best you will ever get for watching a match on TV and the crowd had a strange love towards Gael Clichy who they cheered everytime he was on the ball! If ever there was an example of globalisation then this was it as you had hundreds of Malawians passionately supporting two football clubs from Manchester as if it was normal! When City scored the reaction was intense and, although I enjoyed the game, I was pleased when it was over as I could get some fresh/cool air for once.

Also Matt’s lodge, Maji Zuwa, has just got satellite TV in the hope to attract more customers which is excellent for us as we now get to watch more football and western TV. Last weekend I watched the F.A. Cup final with many locals all cheering for Chelsea as they have more black players! Also Chloe, Elizabeth and I had an evening of British programmes with Who Wants to be a Millionaire, followed by Total Wipeout, QI, Come Dine With Me, Ramesy’s Kitchen Nightmare and Live at the Apollo. I did feel guilty that I wasn’t embracing the Malawian culture but it was the best couple of hours of TV watching ever – instead of watching terrible Nigerian soap opera’s (the acting in those makes even Hollyoaks looks spectacular). The satellite TV meant that I could watch the final weekend of the Premier League, which was pretty incredible as I am sure you are aware… when that final City goal went in it was pretty funny scenes around Maji Zuwa. Also I can’t wait for Euro 2012 and I am already preparing to make England flags to give to the students (Anthony has green, white and orange face paints and he is sure that he will convert more Malawian’s to the Irish!)

At school we had our first really intense staff meeting that lasted just shy of 2 hours. All 7 of us were called to gather during school (so no one was left to teach) and we were discuss the upcoming football tournaments. The next 2 Saturday’s bought football tournaments organised by the government and all schools were asked to participate up and down the country. The games were to be held in a neighbouring town of St Anne’s and it would cost the school K34,000 to transport the students back and forth for both weekends! However there was a problem… the school only had K13,000 in the bank so we were summoned to think of solutions. We were amazed that they still continue to try and take part! We suggested the idea that their education was more important than sport and the fact that we couldn’t even afford to buy chalk meant that an expensive football game wasn’t that best idea. This was well received but I think if we weren’t there they would have found a way to borrow money and put the school into more financial difficulty. So in the end we saved the school a tonne of money, the students we disappointed that the games we called-off but I think they understood! And now we can even afford chalk again, which is excellent as trying to teach without chalk is a nightmare!!

A few weeks back I managed to buy a radio from Karonga that meant that I could listen to the BBC World Service which is so amazing! Everyday I am listening in to what is happening across the world and I don’t feel out-of-touch anymore. On Monday we listened and the opening story was about Malawi – President Banda had devalued the kwacha by about 50% so it’s now K250 to the $1. This is excellent news for me as the kwacha had been at such a poor rate and I was spending far more than I expected. But now it’s K400 to the pound instead of K250, which means I save a bundle of money! The price of a coke goes down from 24p to 16p, but more importantly a nights accommodation somewhere goes down from 5 quid to 3 quid which will save me so much in the next 2 months. The news should also be good for the country as a whole, it is now going to be cheaper to export goods so hopefully the countries exports will grow and help out the trade balance. Obviously it’s going to be more expensive to import but hopefully this won’t make too much difference as fuel is already on black market rates and so a rise at the pumps won’t push the price up too much. All in all the change should be good for Malawi, the new President has bought more optimism into the country and hopefully her gamble will pay off.

Now we have so little time left at the placement and with lots of Public Holidays we have realised we have just 2 full teaching weeks left. I will definitely miss Fulirwa, the kids and the teachers as they have all become so normal in my life. I love teaching now, particularly Business Form 3 at the moment as we are doing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs which I love and then going onto creating CV’s and job interviews which are all going to be great fun. Day by day I am getting more used to the way of life and experimenting more… just the other day I made a soya curry with Bombay potatoes which was a lovely change from the normal rice and soya that we have every day!

Anyway, I had best be off!