Message from Malawi

Hello All,

Hope you are well?

I have now been here in Malawi for 4 weeks and can't believe how fast it has gone by. There have been so many amazing moments, it's hard to do it justice with words alone. I wish so much I could send pictures.

You cannot imagine what it is like in this school when you compare it to schools in England or Japan. One classroom actually takes the form of a shady tree, large stones and two blackboards. The children sit huddled together and share an older battered textbook among 5. The teachers have to stick to a very structured curriculum, everything is taught straight out of the textbook, parrot fashion. They have no resources of any kind and often copy things straight from the blackboard without really understanding the meaning. The Year 5 class I teach in did a 'Major English Test' and the majority of the class got between 5 and 14 out of 100. But you should have seen the questions, they had to name possessive nouns, adverbs of manner, personal pronouns. I wouldn't have been able to identify them and my first language is English!

Many of the students who do have a classroom have no desks or chairs, they sit on the dusty floor. Those with desks, share it with 5 or so others squeezed in. It is amazing to see how the children get on amongst themselves without complaining. They are content with so little, one PE lesson consisted of 120 children running onto a field using balls made out of wool wrapped in a plastic bag and hoops made out of branches.

There were 6 other volunteers here when I arrived so there is a nice group of us working across the schools, nurseries, healthcare clinics and environmental projects. I am trying to visit lots of the projects and understand as much as I can about this country and the challenges faced by the people. The hardest thing is the constant feeling that you are not doing enough and making sure that what you do contribute is sustainable. It would be so easy to just give people money but that will only help today and tomorrow the problem will be there again.

I will write more soon

Best Regards

Sonya