Adapting to the British ways.

So it’s been a week that I have been back in the UK after my 6 month stint in Malawi. I am slowly beginning to adapt to the British life once more – there is a lot of rain, a lot of moaning and a lot of excitement about a certain sporting event coming up soon!

Well I can’t say the journey back was uneventful… I opened up my suitcase once I got home to find all my SD cards had been stolen, meaning that I lost 3,000 photos. Still quite gutted about that, but at least I made it home safely, eh? Since being back I have had the same few questions asked over and over again: What was the best bit? Would you go back to Malawi? Would you become a teacher after your experience? Was it easy living the Malawian lifestyle? What do you miss most about Malawi?

What was the best bit?... Well this question is very difficult to answer; picking my best bit out of the past 6 months is very hard. Obviously I really loved my holiday to Zanzibar but I think my best bits are in Malawi. Arriving at Nkhata Bay in the first week on the top of a rice lorry is still up there in my memories! It was just a perfect way to arrive, so very Malawian and something I will remember for the rest of my life. Obviously there are so many other amazing moments that I can’t begin to list down.

Would I go back to Malawi? Yes. I will almost certainly go back to Malawi at some point in my life. Probably not in the next few years as very little will have changed but I would love to go back in a decade or two and go to my little village, see the pupils and see what has happened to the area. I think this could be quite difficult to take as I feel that very little will have changed – almost like stepping back to 2012.

Would I become a teacher? No. But I was never going to become a teacher; this was just a bit of fun. After teacher over there for 5 months I have a new respect for teachers across the world. It is a very hard and demanding job and unfortunately one that is not for me – I don’t think!

Was it easy living Malawian? At the start it was quite tricky, as I am sure Anthony will be able to back-up! But after a few months it became so simple. Living without electricity I really easy to adapt to and I didn’t miss the TV or a shower at all once adapted. The food was lovely, so amazing that I actually put on a stone in the time I was in Africa! And the people are just the best in the world to my mind.

What I miss most about Malawi? Well there is just so much to miss about the country. I think I miss the Lake quite a lot as swimming in it was a real pleasure. Being able to go down to the Lake every day and being able to swim in warm waters was a luxury (the English Channel or the Solent don’t quite match up!). Also the weather is something I will miss quite a lot… it was just so perfect all the time, being able to spend so much time outside instead of cooped up indoors all the time. And of course I will miss the friendliness of the place. When you walked down the street you would get everyone talking to you, wishing you a good day or smiling. When walking around the streets here all you see is misery on people’s faces – such a stark contrast.

One thing I have been thinking about a lot recently is just how happy the Malawians are. They live in poverty, with so little they should be happy about and yet they are always laughing, joking and having a good time. Then I look to the UK, we have everything in comparison and yet we are always moaning about the weather or the gasman being 10 minutes late. It really makes me think which culture is winning? Isn’t it better to be happy and poor than sad and rich? If there is one thing I will take from my experience in Malawi is to make the most of my life, try not to moan about the insignificant things and enjoy life.

Thank you for following my blog over the past 7 months. If there are any questions at all then please comment or email at d-a-v-i-d@hotmail.co.uk.

Over and out from Malawi 2012. 

Goodbye...

So my time in Malawi is almost over, just enough time for one more blog. I fly home tomorrow afternoon after 6 months in this country. I have to admit I am very excited to go home but I really will miss Malawi a lot.

Over the past week I have continued to volunteer at Butterfly in Nkhata Bay, I chose to stay there for an extra week instead of going to the 4th July celebrations at Maji Zuwa. I loved my time at Nkhata Bay as I got to know the kids at nursery really well by thje wend of the 2 weeks. I picked out my favourite, a little girl called Natasha who is just the cutest girl in the world. I have managed to fit her inside my suitcase and hope to get her through customs in Heathrow... so if you see me with a small African child then you know who it is. There were a few unfortunate events at the nursery including one little boy who weed on me - luckily there was a spare shirt for me to change into - I later learned to keep my distance from that chap.

In the afternoons at Butterfly I would either relax in the lake or help Alice (the owner) move a load of sand and bricks for a new nursery they are building. Moving the bricks was fun as we got to chuck them to each other in a long line - I managed to improve my rugby skills somewhat and now I male a good scrum-half.

Before long my time in Nkhata Bay was over and I had to head back up to Maji Zuwa to collect all my things. We had a little party there on Saturday night which was tough as there were so many people to say goodbye to. I really don't like goodbyes! On the Sunday we were ready to go, after a final wave of hugs we got on the last minibus in Malawi and headed south!

I'm now in Lilongwe and again I find it such a strange place. The city is so wealthy with expensive restaurants and electronic advertising boards - it's incredible to think that this is the same Malawi that I have spent so long in without electricity or running water. I can't say I am a big fan of Lilongwe, however they do have an amazing Indian place where I will have to eat tonight!

Tomorrow I am leaving Malawi around 1pm and heading off to Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) where I will wait for 6 hours until my flight to Heathrow. I'm really not looking forward to it and just want to be home right now. I still can't believe that in 48 hours I will be in my home once more after 6 months here - CRAZY!

Anyway, I will blog once more when I get back to the UK. But for now... goodbye Africa.

Big Kids...

So this is just a quick update on what I`m doing this week. Unfortunately I am typig this on a Belgian keyboard where the letters are in the wrong place so if you see many misspellings then it`s due to the keyboard – not me.

As I said before I am now at Nkhata Bay staying in a place called Butterfly which is a mix of a tourist camp and a volunteering place. I arrived expecting that I would be the only volunteer, however I am one of 8 volunteers working here, 1 Scot, 1 Irish, 1 Northern Irish, 1 German and 4 English... so it`s a nice mix of people. For the first two days I have been working at a local nursery that was set up by Butterfly for kids aged between 2 to 6 (an age group I have never worked with before!). The kids are, in a word, crazy... I spend half of my time there with 6 of them crawling all over my trying to get me to pick them up. But they are also the most adorable kids aswell with the cutest smiles and I can see why Madonna adopted Malawian children!!

At nursery we start at 8am with letters, this week we have be learning the letter A which is going okay but most of the kids are struggling with the tail of the small A. After an hour of learning we have Play Time which is chaos, little children running around everywhere making mud pies and eating them! After play time is porridge which I think is one of the most important things for them as all of them get one decent meal a day. The porridge is maize porridge and is just basically maize and water, they even give me a bowl and I have to say that it isn`t the greatest thing in the world, generally I find the thinest child and fill their bowl up more. But I think it is great that they get the porridge and they all love it, fighting over the scraps left in the bowls. Then we have `Nap Time` which is a favourite for me, jokes... it`s such a big waste of time as the kids never get settled enough to sleep, they just end up rolling around on top of each other for 45 minutes and playing with my leg hair (they are amazed by my leg hair as Africans don`t really have any so they think I`m a bear or something!) I have found something that keeps me entertained during it though, pick up the naughty kids and spin them around... they love it and watching them dizzly bumping into things is hilarious! Then we have another hour of learning, doing numbers or colours... some understand but many of the boys have the attention span of a goldfish and hold up something green and proudly announce that it`s orange.

The nursery is very challenging for me as I`m not used to the age group and they have so much bloody energy!! So I have spent the afternoons hanging out in the lake and mastering the canoe with the other volunteers. Today I am doing something a bit different with a visit to a disabled childs house. The German girl and myself are going to assess how he is progressing and do a few lessons with him which should be good hopefully. At the weekend we are all going to another school set up by Butterfly with our paint brushes to give it a make-over.

All in all I am loving this week at Nkhata Bay, plently of interesting stuff to do with some really nice people to work along side. Not quite sure what I am going to do next week, been invited to stay here, go to Nhkotakota with some Lattitude volunteers or go back up to Maji Zuwa... who knows!?

Bye Bye Fulirwa!

I’m sorry that I haven’t been keeping in touch with you recently but the problem is that I don’t have a laptop I can write my blogs up on anymore as Anthony got his bag stolen in Mzuzu which contained the precious laptop! Fortunately Anthony is okay and he can claim most of it back on the insurance so that’s all good.

Well last time I updated the blog I was talking about 2 weeks off due to the Form 2 exams, but I didn’t know what to do… well… I decided that I would help out some American volunteers staying at Maji Zuwa who are building a new school block at Khwawa CDSS (where Chloe and Liz teach). I was accepted by Matt, saying they need all the help they could get so during the first week of the holiday I went down to the school and helped build. Now, I have no knowledge about building at all and I have never laid a single brick before that week but now I am proud to say I still know very little!! The other volunteers are all Engineering students and so they had to explain everything to me like I was an idiot! I learned how to mix sand and cement without a cement mixer and how to lay bricks and fill. By the end of the week we had done half of the 4 foot foundations which I was quite pleased with. The work itself was quite easy, the difficult part was standing outside in the sun for 9 hours at a time – my scalp got quite burned after I forgot to suncream it up!! After the week I decided that my building days were behind me and I should retire from construction forever and I got invited on a holiday with Chloe and Liz.

The girls were going to take to ferry to Ruarwe which is a really remote resort that is a 6 hour hike away from the closest civilisation. Perfect! I tagged along with them and we arrived in Ruarwe on the Monday morning. The resort doesn’t have any electricity or running water, just a heap of books, board games and a view to die for. I was still a bit miffed as it meant that I couldn’t see the England game and there was no phone coverage to receive updates! After 3 games of Monopoly, 4 Scrabble games, numerous games of Bridge, 2 books and 2 days we decided there wasn’t that much left to do so we managed to get on the mid-week boat to Nkhata Bay. I wasn’t feeling very great after my pancakes that morning and was very sick on the journey (I’ve never had sea-sickness but I know lake-sickness isn’t very pleasant!). Other than throwing up, everything else was going well as we were cruising towards Nkhata Bay, until the captain decided to dock for “a 15 minute break”. After 2 hours of not seeing anyone we got suspicious and decided to go and look for people, only to find they were all chatting and had decided to go back to Ruarwe today!! We were stuck in a very small village with no room to stay, water or food. Luckily there was a conference going on and we managed to hitch a lift in a rich mans car all the way to Mzuzu – phewww!

Nkhata Bay was great as usual, we stayed a place called Butterfly this time which is a tourist place but also does a lot for the community, its set up a local radio station for the kids, a music area and much more. The owners are incredibly friendly and we met another Englishman who we watched the England v Sweden game with. There were only 4 English people in the large African bar but we made up for it with noise as England took us on another rollcoaster ride of emotions!

Also during the 2 weeks off I went and visited the Bwengu girls for a couple of nights. On the Monday I went to their school and sat in some of their classes which was very interesting to compare with my school. I was shown in the Form 3 Maths class and Sarah mentioned that I taught maths at Fulirwa, at this point the teacher said “Oh excellent, you can teach this class for me then,” – or words similar. With that I was thrown into an alien maths class with just a book and a piece of chalk for 40 minutes. I was so proud of the way I dealt with it and I realise that I would never have been able to do that at the start of the trip. But now I really enjoyed it, testing the kids knowledge and being able to manage a class of 40! After school finished the girls took me to one of their local shops (an average Malawian shops that sells the basics) and we took over for the afternoon, greeting and serving the customers. Okay, there was a communication issue and we had to be helped by the owner almost every time but it was great fun and I realised how much I miss serving people. The business is quite incredible, they never look busy and there are so many competitors around the area but he reckons he would take K15,000 to K30,000 a day (40 – 75 quid!) which is an amazingly large amount in Malawi. Obvious this is only his revenue and I am sure his profits are just a tiny percentage of that figure. In the two hours we were there 14 people came in and asked for a Coke (which was unfortunate as we were out of Coke and most didn’t like the alternatives.)

So the 2 weeks ended and we went back to school, if only for a week. The week was full of exams for our Form 1’s and 3’s which is actually quite a nervous time for me as I get to see whether my teaching has helped them. The results weren't too bad in the end but I would have hoped for better with my Form 3 Maths after we did so much extra study. On Friday we were given an amazing send off from the school with a nice party, speeches and Coca-Cola of course!!

Now I have just 2 weeks left in Malawi but I don’t have anymore work to do at the school. I was going to work on the school building again with the American volunteers but I have decided to go back to Butterfly in Nkhata Bay and volunteer there. I am now volunteering there in a nursery school with kids aged between 2 and 6 which is quite challenging but also so much fun. I am also going to help out with football training and a video editing suite that they have there. I really want to do as many different things here before I leave and I hope that the week there will be beneficial! Also it means that I can watch all the remaining football games on the massive screen they have at the Bay – good thinking eh? I am only going to stay there a week as I want to be back at Maji Zuwa for the 4^th July as there is going to be a huge party for American Independence Day with about 50 Peace Corps volunteers invited. I think it will be quite funny to be there with Chloe and Liz (proud Brits)!

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!

Carisbrooke Castle in Malawi!

After a long Easter holiday I am now back doing the day job in Fulirwa. The first few days were hard as I had to go back living the basic lifestyle, without electricity and running water, but now I am enjoying life once more. Time is going very quickly and I now have just over 2 months left of the placement… and less time actually teaching!

We came back to quite a shock, one of our teachers had been transferred to another local school – something the headteacher wasn’t too happy about. This meant that we had just 5 other teachers apart from Anthony and myself. 7 teachers to do 180 periods in a week is pretty tough and the headteacher has had to take on 27 periods along with headteacher duties, so things are pretty hectic around here. Having said that, I have actually lost some of my periods as I had to give up English Literature Form 1 to another teacher who has to be assessed in it. So now I am down to 17 subjects a week which is fairly low, but this has given me more time to do extra lessons with my Form 3’s to help their maths and business, which are horrifically bad! They are 18 years old and can’t answer “I think of a number, add 5 to it and multiply it by 3. The number I end up with is 39. What number did I start with?” (The answer is 8, for those who can’t do that!!) So I have been working on their basic maths skills, teaching them Form 1 maths in spare periods and after school, hoping that will help them. So far I have actually seen a vast improvement in there maths – now they can do difficult quadratic equations with ease – though whether they will be able to do it come their exams is another matter!

I am starting to enjoy teaching English Form 1’s now, before it was my worst subject as I had been going through the study book and they really couldn’t do the work. It was such a pain to me that I bought a teacher’s guide book for English in Lilongwe and to my amazement there was an extract describing Carisbrooke Castle! They wanted the Malawian students to do an exercise where they had to write a leaflet for tourists going to Carisbrooke Castle explaining what they could see, including “Working donkeys”!! The idea of 15 year old Malawian students learning about the Castle’s construction – like I did when I was their age is quite strange and remarkable! I will have to do that topic with them soon but for now I am doing a topic about weather where they are writing weather forecasts and I will film them present the weather on Monday… should be interesting as I have promised a prize to the best one.

Business Enterprise is going well, last week I taught them how to do a cashflow forecast, which they seemed to enjoy and made a cashflow for their imaginary business. This week was SWOT analysis and a balance sheet, so they are gaining important business knowledge little by little which will hopefully help them in the future. After a request from some of my students I have started teaching them how to use the school’s laptop, which is extremely interesting for both them and me as the differences between cultures is incredible. We started off by using Word and they, “Ooo”ed and “Ahh”ed as letters appeared on the screen as I typed. They also find it completely hilarious every time a new line is automatically started instead of going off the end of the screen… and when I showed them they could make the font bigger they were utterly amazed. After some getting used to I got them all to do some typing as we wrote an email to students at Ryde High School in the hope they will reply. The email was about ½ a page long and took 1 ½ hours to type (even slower than my dad which I didn’t think were possible!) but I was very proud of their efforts and I hope someone from the school will reply as it will really get them excited (HINT-HINT TO ANYONE AT RYDE WHO IS READING THIS!) As well as the great excitements of the computer I have just found a DVD of Planet Earth in our school library, which a former volunteer must have left, and now I am showing them one episode per week which they love. They haven’t seen the world before, anything outside the village is alien to them and to see polar bears, penguins and other exotic animals is great for them. Unfortunately I am going to run out of David Attenborough classics before I leave but I am going to search the markets for something similar!

Since coming back from Easter I seem to have acquired a boyfriend! Francis, a student in Form 1, rushed after me after class one day and handed me a note saying, “Mr Davide Lewis, I want a relationship with you as a friendship. Good Luck, Francis.” To which I said “Aww thanks, I will put this up on my wall”. Obviously this wasn’t the answer he was looking for as the next day he nervously came up to me again… he was a bit like a love-sick 13 year old and asked, “Have you…. thought about… umm… ummm… the relationship?” So I said that we could be friends and shook his hand politely. Then the very next day he turned up at our house at 6:15am with a bag full of 12 eggs, which is so amazingly generous – eggs are very valuable around here and 12 is a lot of eggs. Since then he has been asking to come to the house and talk to me, I am trying to subtly keep my distance but I don’t think its working. It’s a shame because he is a great kid just I think he is slightly confused at the moment!!

Anthony received a thermometer in the post from his mum so now for the first time we can actually see how hot it is which is quite interesting. I first saw it in our house at about 7pm and it read 28^O which explains why I get so hot at nights. The hottest I have seen it so far is 33 ^O but bearing in mind we are starting the dry season now and it’s getting much cooler I think it must have been in the high 30’s at the start of the year! Most mornings I wake up freezing, shivering as I get out of bed – the other morning in particular so I took the thermometer outside, and I was right a freezing temperature of 18^O! As I said, the dry season is starting – we are still getting the occasional downpours but nothing like we were getting in March. It’s going to be quite an interesting change in the landscape of Malawi as already things seem less green.

Last weekend was the former President’s funeral and so Monday was a Public Holiday. Since President Joyce Banda has taken office there has been an incredible sugar crisis, I thought the queues of 100’s of cars to get petrol was insane but seeing 100’s of people queuing for sugar is truly incredible. There is genuine excitement, though, of what Banda can achieve, she needs to reinstate trusted democracy back to Malawi as well as sort out the failing economy. The papers are already saying she will devalue to kwacha, lets hope its not just speculation this time! There was quite a lot of interest around for the funeral and everyone had their radios on to listen to the service… unfortunately I didn’t get chance to listen or watch as I was travelling back from Nkhata Bay where we spent the weekend. Whilst at Nkhata Bay there was an interesting party where I met a guy that is going to Oxford Brookes next year to study Politics and Economics (I am studying Politics, Economics and International Relations there) pretty small world, eh?

This weekend we are going up to Livingstonia, made famous by Dr. David Livingstone who started a settlement in the mountains to avoid malaria carrying mosquitoes. The trip requires a 3 hour hike up a dirt track to get to the top where we will stay with Rakesh and Claus who live up the mountain. I’m quite excited about the weekend, don’t know why exactly but should be good and then of course we have another day off on Tuesday for “Labour Day”! So for now, as I want to keep this blog post nice and short, I will finish but I will update you again soon…