Mon 13 July

Apologies for not blogging for a few days due to the following reasons: Fri – too tired to walk into town, Sat – too busy & Sun - Internet café closed.

On Friday there was a minor miracle when I actually slept through the bells and missed Mass. I think the exhausting schedule from the previous week plus the daily 6am starts had finally caught up with me - at home I can’t even sleep through a text message beep. As a result I had a long lie (until 6:30am!!) and took it easy for the rest of the day with my usual couple of hrs in the staff room in the morning and a visit to St. Peter’s orphan group in the afternoon. I really enjoy my time chatting with the teachers each day. They tell me fascinating stories about Malawian culture including witchcraft, circumcision, child marriages and death rituals. On Fri evening I set up the laptop and projector to watch a DVD with Fr. Banda and the seminarians. I chose Jerry Maguire thinking there were no “dodgy bits” – I was wrong!

I visited Mary Martha Orphan Care Centre again on Saturday. I had planned on a very informal visit to spend some time with the orphans but even with the little notice I gave them they still managed to prepare a really nice welcome ceremony with singing, poems, games and speeches from the Director, village headman, the founder Mr. Kavuta and myself (due to absence of Big Head!) We planned a party for the orphans on 25^th (funded by St. Matthew’s Maths dept.) and I asked them to think about a proposal for the donation from St. Matthew’s, which I’ll present at the party. I asked Mr. Kavuta about how prevalent HIV is among the orphans and unfortunately there is a large number. Celia – you would have found it hard to cope when he pointed out certain kids, including his own grandson, who were HIV+. It was heartbreaking but as usual they had smiles on their faces. Even some of the volunteer workers there are positive.

On Saturday evening I was invited to dinner at Daphne Okoronko’s. Daphne is Nigerian, married with 2 gorgeous kids, Chukes 5 and Ingo 3, and was formerly Head of St. Peter’s but she gave it up due to Cultural differences. We had a really lovely meal followed by a very interesting chat about Malawian culture compared to Nigerian culture.

Sun was a bit of a non-event due to no water and electricity for the whole day. Welcome to the real Malawi! This is a weekly occurrence but when the whole group was here unfortunately it only went off for 10 mins. I worked on the statistics project for a couple of hours, which is almost at completion. The general knowledge quiz was fairly close with St. Peter’s scoring 47% and St. Matthew’s 58%. However 91% of St. Peter’s students answered 23 x 12 correctly compared to only 58% of St. Matthew’s - shocking!

Thanks for all the blog comments. They mean even more to me when I’m here alone and it’s been great reading about all the kid’s experiences as well. I think they haven proven without doubt that Celia, Eric and & I couldn’t have picked a better group of kids to share this experience with us.

Busy day today as Maggie Frame from Greenwood Academy is visiting for the day - details tomorrow.