Once again I heard a rooster earlyyyy in the morning.
Today was the day we were traveling to all the schools that we will be working at. The first school was the village primary school called Maliemia that Radford University students will be teaching at.
When we got off the bus all these little kids came running towards us. It was sooo many of them. Of course they did call us “white people” in Chichewa since they believe that everyone in America is white including me and Danielle. And they all went crazy when people took out their cameras. In Malawi, you can never just take one picture of a child; you have to take a picture of all of them. What I did was, I took their pictures and actually let them see their selves on the camera which blew their minds. Eventually, I did put my camera away because I noticed that they started pushing and fighting for pictures and I didn’t like that at all. I did get to meet a little girl whose name was also Michele, but I bet she most likely spells it completely different.
I peeked into some of the classes that were still in session and I was very amazed at how discipline they were even if they did have over a hundred kids in each class sitting on the floor. I also got to speak with some of the teachers and they were very nice and happy to see us.
One thing I noticed between the younger and older kids was that the older kids were very distant and didn’t want to say anything to us. So I decided to go up and start talking to them. Most of them were either in standard 6, 7, 8. One boy decided to ask me a million questions like “Why are you here? Where did you come from? Why this school? What is it like at your home?” I could understand why he was asking so many questions and I was actually glad he did. And I guess I must have done well in answering the questions because after he let go of his hard face he smiled and said “Welcome to Malawi.”
The way school works in Malawi, they have primary school and secondary school. Primary school has standards 1-8. In standard 8 they take an exam and the students who do the best on the exams are accepted into secondary school, but some drop out even if they are accepted because they can’t afford the small fees of secondary school. Secondary is for four years and on the last year you have to take an exam and whoever does best on the exam can go on to the university. So it’s like pyramid style with the amount of students getting smaller as the level of education gets higher.
So the next school we went to was the Government Primary School. This school is where the Virginia Tech students would be teaching. One thing I noticed about this school and the last school was that some students here had uniforms while the students at the last school didn’t. This school also had the child feeding program which is why there were so many little kids, who were too young to start school, hanging around on the yard. Again, classes here were pretty big with over 100 students in each class. But what I did get to see since they put the attendance on the board was that most classes averaged about 30 kids being absent each day. I also got to see the library A&T started at this school; it’s a small locked up room but at least they have one.
The next primary school we visited was the Domasi Demonstration Primary School where Danielle, Dr. Barber and I will be working. This school looked the best out of all of them and every student had a uniform. Dr. Barber was well at home; every teacher knew her there and they were ecstatic to see her. The teachers at this school set up a room of chairs for all of us to sit around and introduce ourselves. This one teacher name Gift was the most outgoing and very friendly so I might work with his class. He showed us around the school and kept teaching us words in Chichewa.
After this school we walked over to secondary school next door. This is the school that the two Virginia Tech PhD students will be teaching at. One thing I found sad about this school was that their library was pretty and had many shelves, but barely any books and the books they did have looked extremely old like they came from the 70’s or 80’s. We didn’t stay too long in this school because the two PhD students had to meet with the head teacher and talk about some things.
When we did finish visiting the schools we headed into town to go visit a fabric store. Apparently there is a seamstress nearby who can make anything you want as long as you buy the fabric. So everybody bought pretty fabric to take to her soon.
After going to the store to pick up some more bottle water we all decided to walk back to the lodge instead of driving so we can know how to get back and forth on our own. This was the part I regretted. That was the longest walk in life and the whole thing was walking up hill. And at one point this man was following us until we went in this store and we got one of the workers to get him to leave us alone. That was kind of scary because he looked crazy. The main thing I did like a lot about our walk was that I did get to see the little monkeys on the trees outside of Annie’s Lodge.
Now here is the part when things started going downhill. My back was hurting a lot from the walk because I already get back pains on the regular so this walk made it worse. And I don’t know if it was something I ate but I got very sick at night. My stomach was killing me and since my luggage wasn’t here yet I didn’t have my medicine so I had to ask Dr. Barber for some. This whole night was just completely painful and I didn’t get any sleep.
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