MALAWI 10-17-10

It has been an active week since our last posting. On Monday, determined to get one of the boy’s school fees paid, we set off for Chinsapo to confer with the young man. While he appreciated our urgency to get him back into school, he wanted to go to a fairly new school that he believed would be far superior and more expensive. He is correct about the inadequacies of his present school, which is formed by teachers from Chinsapo Secondary School. Instead of teaching a full day, the teachers teach in the morning, and then in the afternoon present classes for a few hours in what they call Chinsapo Night, charging the same fees that would be collected in the government secondary school. This allows the teachers to double their meager salary without increasing their hours, a common practice.

We asked our young man to speak to the staff at the school he preferred, tell them his story, and see if they are willing to accept him in at the same cost. If so, we would commit ourselves by supporting his change. After lunch, we were told that the staff at Unity school wanted to talk to us, so we went together up the dusty road to a cluster of mud brick class rooms and a few falling apart two room structures used for offices, library and storage. This school began three years ago by a group of Malawian 2 or 3 year college students and newly graduated teachers. So far 95% of their second year students have past the junior national exams. They are still waiting for the results of their first group of fourth year students. If one thing is clear from our visit, the teachers and its combination administration make up the real hope for Malawi’s education. The Administrator himself was once in the same situation as the young man we are trying to help.

With some conversation, they did accept our proposition to prepare our student for the national exams, starting at seven am Tuesday morning. Looking over their library, we loaded the young administrator in our truck to introduce him to the National Library’s unadvertised program to assist fledgling librarys and schools with books donated by publishers and librarys in the U.S., Canada and the UK. For 500 Kwacha ($3.30) per year he can select from the shipping containers as many books as he can carry as often as he can get to town.

Tuesday began our adventure to visit Karonga, 590Km to the north, where a CRS funded project has been in operation for six years supporting now 66 community based child care centers along with eleven different programs targeting all levels of the community. We have noted before, the red clay dust and the smoke in the air. We traveled through national game reserves, pine and Eucalyptus forests, and rubber plantations, natural native forests high in the mountains, sugar cane fields, and casaba fields and everywhere fires are consuming the grasses and many native trees. There seems to be a belief that the new grass will not come unless the old is burnt away. The government discourages this practice but lacks the ability to implement change. Even with the smoke limiting the visibility of what would be a 100 mile view during the rainy season, the view descending the high mountains to the lake and the river plains is spectacular.  The Lake Malawi itself is a place of refuge and peaceful beauty.

Remembering that Malawi and its beautiful lake is formed by Africa’s Great Rift Valley, it’s not surprising that the Karonga area, at the northern end of the lake, experienced a series of earthquakes the end of 2009. Some of the larger structures, churches and warehouses, are still not usable. A number of groups are working on the reconstruction as well as continuing their education and humanitarian efforts

We are back in Lilongwe just in time to say our good byes and pack ourselves up for our return home starting Monday.