Let's make sure we water it!

Muli bwanji!

It has been over a month since the last interns and coordinators left Lilongwe after two awesome summer sessions. John, Vito and Angoni still talk about how much fun they had with the mzungus over the summer and they hope that you will all come back sometime soon!

Over these past 4 weeks Reinier and Michael have been working hard on developing ways in which we can make our work even more sustainable. Many brainstorm sessions, phone calls, and headaches later we developed what we call the “Educational Follow-Up Program”.

This summer we started meeting with key stakeholders in our target communities: the School Management Committees and Parent Teacher Associations. These committees argued that they would like to be more involved with World Camp’s activities in order to make the entire community part of educational improvement. Their call for community participation and follow-up support encouraged us to return to 2 potential partner communities, Mkhosi and Matapila, in order to respond to this identified need. Both these communities struggle with high student/teacher ratios, many social barriers related to HIV/AIDS, and a general lack of basic knowledge on HIV.

Our team, consisting of Michael, Reinier, Chikabachi, Cyrus, Cathy, Winter, and George, will be working on several activities.

First, we are going to conduct an in-depth community assessment in order to better understand issues surrounding stigmas, healthcare, educational outreach, and many others as well as the role of the local CBO in this. This information will help us develop a clear picture of our potential partner communities and enable us to more effectively conduct possible future activities.

Second, Reinier and George will be staying with the community for a week to facilitate an empowerment writing workshop. We have identified that our empowerment sessions need more sustainability and strongly believe that creative writing could help students get certain things off their chest and make sensitive topics discussable.

Third, at the end of the week we will conduct an intensive educational follow-up workshop. We will divide the community up into 4 groups (teachers + headmaster, community members, students, and the SMC/PTA) and each field assistant will work with a specific group of their choice. We’ll be strengthening activism clubs, provide follow-up teacher training, increase awareness among the SMC and PTA of their responsibilities in improving educational standards, and conduct HIV/AIDS workshops with the wider community. At the end of the day each group will participate in a collective “Jungle Walk” and present their action plan on working towards educational improvement related to HIV/AIDS to the other groups.

We are all very excited about this as we truly believe that this follow-up program will increase the continuation of our impact in our partner communities!

Wangari Maathai once said “until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven’t done a thing. You are just talking”. In a certain sense this relates closely to World Camp’s educational activities at our partner communities: we conducted educational camps and teacher training, now let’s make sure we water it and make it survive!