Welcome to Wednesday

You know the story by now – Cathedral bells, half-shut knives, not morning people, etc, etc. We breakfasted after 6.30 a.m. Mass with Monday’s Scottish-style porridge being partly replaced by Malawian porridge made with maize and peanut butter – don’t worry, Northcotes, all 7 members of staff made sure Michael was eating the oat mixture without the peanuts!

We headed off to school on what was a dull, damp, cloudy day with Monday’s dusty paths and roads turning to sticky red mud and making our shiny shoes look a tad unattractive. Tuesday was a pretty heavy day in school with our 6 pupils shadowing Malawian youngsters through a day’s timetable, staff shadowing teachers in their own subject disciplines and Eric and Celia meeting with Mr Banda (Head Teacher) and Mr Lungu (Depute Head Teacher) to look at how the project might develop from here. For some reason, there seemed to be a lot of Malawian staff not at work yesterday so several of the staff ended up teaching classes – some of them even ended up teaching classes which were being observed by other St Matthew’s teachers!

Bernadette has been really disappointed by the high quality of the food so far and made the executive decision to instruct the school to stop spending so much money on looking after us – her argument being that every Kwacha spent on us is a Kwacha less to spend on the needs of the school and the local community. So it was with some trepidation that we approached lunch only to find that the instruction to reduce the food budget by 50% had not yet been communicated to the cooks! Evening meal – well, that was a different story as you will see later. However, the day was still cold – so much so, in fact, that Annie our house lady appeared with a brazier full of red hot coals which the pupils huddled round as they tried to get warm; Caroline even put her pyjama trousers on under her school skirt – very attractive!

The school day here has nine periods – four before break at about 10 o’clock; another three from break to lunch at 12.30ish and only two in the afternoon which is supposed to be followed at 2.00 p.m. by an hour’s study. However, Tuesday’s study period was abandoned in favour of sports in which some of the more enthusiastic and fitter members of staff (i.e not Eric) took part along with the pupils. By this time, the weather had cheered up a bit which we hope augurs well for our trip to Nkhata Bay this afternoon.

And so to dinner. So far we had feasted on lovely lean beef (a real luxury in Malawi), beautiful fillets of chambo (locally caught fish), plump chunks of chicken, diced potatoes, boiled rice and vegetables. Tuesday’s evening meal was somewhat different, although we all agreed that it was none the worse for being typically Malawian. We had vegetable soup followed by pieces of chicken with nsema, boiled mustard leaves, boiled mustard leaves mixed with groundnuts (don’t worry, Northcotes – see above comment re breakfast, only for “porridge” read “leaves”!), boiled/baked plantains (hard, fairly tasteless bananas) and a sort of kidney bean stew.

We downloaded your comments on the first blog yesterday and will do the same today for Tuesday’s report. It’s good to know that you are following our adventures. Everyone is keeping well, no-one has been bitten by mosquitos and we are all looking forward to being tourists this afternoon at Nkhata Bay. Tune in tomorrow for the next instalment.