Muli Bwanji!
Reinier and George are back in Lilongwe after spending two awesome weeks in two of our potential partner communities: Matapila and Mkhosi.
We’re glad to say that our experience could not have been any better and the Educational Follow-Up Program has proven to be a big hit in rural Malawi!
Upon arrival, we received a warm welcome by all the teachers, students, and community members who remembered World Camp from our camps and homestays this summer.
The headmasters of both schools invited us to stay with them for the week, something they probably regretted after realizing that we couldn’t stop asking them about education, HIV/AIDS, activism clubs, hyenas, and black mambas. However, all these questions as well as meetings with key stakeholders in the communities helped us to develop a clear understanding of the structures, struggles, and opportunities that exist. We soon became amazed about how much was being done by the village headmen, SMC/PTA committees, support groups, and many others despite the huge challenges that these communities face. Also, the constant quest for skills and training instead of “things” or “kwacha” really enabled us to have insightful talks about moving forward.
All these key stakeholders brought their energy, ideas, and concerns to our Leadership Workshop at the end of the week. Seeing the SMC/PTA talk about their responsibilities, village headmen discussing with students how they could help clubs to be more active, and teachers brainstorming about ways to increase peer education could not have been more inspiring. Our field assistants did an amazing job facilitating this process, because truly seeing the community discuss educational improvement among each other was exactly what we hoped for.
Last, during both weeks we started Empowerment Writing Workshops with St. 8 students. We had contacted NGOs, World Camp alumni, and other experts on how to effectively teach young people about creative writing but still were a bit nervous to see how it would play out in practice. We worked closely together with all the teachers and carefully explained what short stories, poetry, and journaling are all about. The students insisted to write in English and both the boys and the girls were excited about becoming awesome writers. We told them that they should see the journals that we gave them as new friends that they can talk to about anything, which helped to really make it an empowerment writing class.
Read Alefa's introduction to her short story to get a bit of an idea what their stories were about:
“My Birthday”
“A long time ago there was my birthday. But this day was very happy because there were many people on this day.
I welcomed many friends, these friends are Charity, Dyna, Cathirin and Yustina.
This birthday started at 2:00pm and finished at 6:00pm.
When it finished there were two girls and two boys, these children were going to the forest at 7:30pm and this one girl was HIV positive.
At the forest was sexual intercourse.
Because of sexual intercourse they contracted HIV. Then all the girls died and the boys contracted HIV.
When I go there two years later the boys are also dead.
Many people in the area suffer from HIV and AIDS and in our area, population is decreasing and children of orphanage are increasing.”
It was amazing to see that many of the students were able to give some of their sad stories a positive twist by looking critically at themselves and describing how they could do something to put a smile on their own face and on that of others.
These students definitely made us smile, and writing this blog puts a smile on my face again. What makes me even happier though is thinking back of how involved, excited, and helpful all the teachers were during these workshops. Seeing these teachers work incredibly hard in overcrowded classrooms and being able to provide them with new ideas on how to empower their students is what cannot make me stop smiling!
