All smiles

All was going smoothly and I was getting back into the swing of things at work, planning trainings etc. We have a full schedule from now up till Christmas – or at least we did until yesterday when we discovered that the Education Advisors who we work with will all be away for the next few weeks on a Ministry training as they are planning to continue rolling out the new curriculum. Basically the Advisors will be either attending trainings or conducting trainings! So our whole programme has gone out the window!! This is not surprising as we have been expecting something like this to happen, just not to this scale!

We will have a rethink and probably just conduct training without the Advisors which isn’t really the point but still it is better than nothing!

I have also been around the schools that I linked with Winchburgh and Holy Family to deliver the photos of their penpals. When back in Scotland I gave the pupils in Winchburgh their letters along with a photo of their penpal here so my job was to deliver them to the pupils here. The children absolutely loved getting not only a copy of their own photo but one of their new ‘mazungu’ penpal. What are normally calm, peaceful classrooms in Malawi turned into super-hyper environments but it was wonderful to see their reactions. One of the headteachers even told the pupils to kiss their new friends and demonstrated by kissing the photo of one of the pupils! This cause much hilarity all round!

Just goes to show what a small thing like a photo can do!!

I have also had a few requests for teachers to write to someone in the UK. It probably wouldn’t require much so if you are interested in this please let me know!