Mon 27 July

Monire mose,

My last blog ended quite abruptly, so I’ll try to continue where I left off. After the various farewell parties on Friday we went to Daphne Okoronko’s for drinks then headed to the hotel for the infamous Friday night disco with Lesley (Canadian missionary) and James Mbale (St. Peter’s teacher). We impressively managed to last until 1:50am and even more impressively Paul and Anne still went to Mass on Sat morn whereas I just tried my best to ignore the bells and have a lie in.

On Saturday it was party time again, this time at Mary Martha’s orphan centre and another emotional farewell. The kids at Mary Martha would melt the hardest of hearts as they have so little but are always smiling. They danced and sang for us as usual but the icing on the cake was when the nursery class performed various rhymes – they were adorable.

We went for dinner to Irene Jere’s house on Sat night, where we had lovely traditional Malawian food and lots of chat, as Irene never stops talking. She will make quite an impact on the exchange trip to St. Mary’s next year. Anne made a new friend during the meal – you’ll have to wait until we get back for the details but I will say that Roland would be an appropriate name.

You can never get too many Masses here so on Sun morning we went twice, totalling over 4 hours. We were forced up onto the altar during the second one to bid our farewells and I managed to impress the congregation by saying half of my speech in Tumbuka without any notes. After lunch at the Head Teacher’s house I had 4 hours of meetings whilst Anne and Paul enjoyed a rare lazy afternoon. The first meeting was of the school committee and the second one was the orphan scholarship committee.

Both meetings were very encouraging. The school committee were very keen to hear about all my observations of how the school is doing and they were very open to any ideas for improvement. The orphan scholarship committee really impressed me with their dedication in caring for these orphans physically, educationally and socially. We provide the scholarship money but they work really hard here to make the scheme a success. Unfortunately I had to officially inform them that we can no longer afford to keep 100 orphans in school. This has been the only negative aspect of this trip and I feel as if we are failing them. At the same time I feel as though we are constantly appealing for more sponsors at home with little response. Everywhere we go here people go on about what we are doing for the orphans of Mzuzu and it really saddens me to have to reduce our help but this year St. Matthew’s has had to supplement the money from direct debits quite significantly. Probably everyone reading this is already a sponsor but if not please think seriously about becoming one. It costs £12 a month to educate an orphan but we accept any amount from £5. I would love to be able to go back on the decision and keep the number at 100 in January. One addition I have made is to add the eldest son, Wisdom, of the teacher who committed suicide on to the scheme. He is at Nkhata Bay Secondary, which is a Catholic boys boarding school. I’m sure we’ll find the money from somewhere.

Yet another Farewell party on Sun night but this time it was us throwing the party for our hosts. We went out to dinner with Fr. Chunda, Matthias and Steven (seminarians), Mr. Banda (Head Teacher) and Elizabeth (his wife), Boniface Chirwa (school committee chairman), Irene Jere (St. Peter’s Primary) and Miriam and Annie(our housekeepers). We went to our local, the Ilala Lodge, and had a lovely evening together ending with the now Malawian favourite game of OH-SO-KO. Critical Skills has reached Malawi.

On my own again as Paul and Anne have left for Mua. Had the interviews for exchange visit to Scotland but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the details.

Pawemi,

Bernadette