As always, more details and pictures of all our projects in Chitipa can be found at https://chitipaics.wordpress.com/
Another hectic week as the pace of our lives in Chitipa gathers momentum. Full of long work days and a whole host of community activities, it only seems like yesterday when we were writing the last blog post!
At TDI this week some exciting plans have begun to get underway! Each pair has launched a drama, dance and music competition at their youth groups for the young people to showcase their talents. This is not only just for fun, the drama in particular helps us at TDI to get more of an understanding of groups’ knowledge of life skills. At the Tondola church meeting Maureen and David were given a sneak preview of some of their acts by a few keen groups who sung and acted out scenes to with HIV/AIDS prevention and substance abuse. Later in the week we had some training in leadership skills, this was very worthwhile not only for us as individual volunteers but also because we plan to pass our training on to our youth groups and put into practice and share our newly learnt skills and knowledge with the young people we are working with! Everyone is getting settled in with their youth groups and making friends, this means even more people to stop and greet everywhere we go!
Wednesday afternoon saw the arrival of a Lattitude coordinator from South Africa, John. He will be staying and working with us until mid-placement review. We all greeted him at Chitipa Inn and after he dubbed himself “a workaholic control freak, who wants to connect to every volunteer on a personal level”, although we’ve only known John for 4 days he has already brought such a positive vibe to our team and we are really looking forward to all he has to share with us!
Thursday saw the first outdoor movie night, with our very own “rustic” cinema. Charlotte and Annette’s host parents kindly agreed to host the night, borrowing a projector from the District Commissioner and renting seats from a local church. As we’ve mentioned we eat a lot of maize products here, the best of these definitely being POPCORN!! This is well suited for our film night. The votes were cast with the majority deciding that we’d be watching Slumdog Millionaire, after an hours delay in starting (Malawi time…) we settled down for a great night. The odds were clearly in our favor for as soon as we returned home another blackout struck! Maybe we jinxed it last week, but this week we have had an excess of power cuts… Daily with some lasting for over 12 hours, we are even experiencing one right now!
This weeks Friday learning day was conducted by Ana and Maureen on the topic of ‘Peace and Conflict’. It was a very creative day which involved us making our own peace symbols out of rubbish and then being subject to an unforeseen conflict as Ana tore down the winning symbol. We also found ourselves in many ‘situations’ where we had to revolve ‘conflicts’, we learnt that a moment of conflict can be transformed into a moment of opportunity! A fantastic day was had by all.
On Saturday the social team organized our very own “rustic” Olympics! With teams competing in heats of super fun games gaining points to be crowned the champions! The games included: potato and spoon race, sprint, clothes race, sack race, three-legged race, balance bottle on head race (very African!) and finally a relay race, where everyone had to compete taking a lap around the whole of Chitipa inn! Afterwards we had a big water fight which was great fun, we all got totally soaked!!! We dried off in the sun with a nice cold pineapple fanta. Thanks again for another great Saturday social team!
Something we haven’t mentioned yet is what can only be described as the yelling and excitement wherever the white UKV’s go. Especially the children will wave and run to greet you yelling “muzungu” (white person), although a little confusing at first it will now be weird when we go home to multi-cultural Britain where your skin colour isn’t considered exciting or even noticeable! It’s easy to say that we stick out like sore thumbs in this very rural part of Africa, for some people the white UKV’s are the first “muzungu’s” they’ve ever seen!
As we have mentioned before, Sundays are spent going to church and relaxing, doing chores like washing our clothes by hand. The ICVs think the UKVs are rubbish at washing clothes, like with making nsima, we just just don’t have the strength! When the UKVs explained to their counterparts that in the UK we have machines to do the chore for us they couldn’t believe it!
Note from the Team Leaders: As our second month in Chitipa begins we are pleased our wonderful team has laid the foundations for the projects and settled in well to Chitipa life. We are so excited to see the progress of all of the hard work over the coming weeks!
We would all love to wish Thumbiko (our in-country team leader) a massive congratulations on his graduation this week, we are all so proud!
Joke of the week:
Two men walk into a bar.
The first man orders H2O
The second man says “I’ll have an H2O too”
The second man dies.
