Tuesday, 19 August 2014

From the Questoverseas Summer Team

Thanks to Liz Munday for her update from Malawi, keep up the great work guys.

Achimwene!

Having finished our stay in Chillingani, we have just arrived in Pensulo. It was very sad to say goodbye to all of the wonderful children we got on so well with, and the rest of the community, but we have made great memories. We finished building the foundations and walls of the new headteacher's office and staffroom after much hard work and lots of fun and laughter, this was a great achievement. We hope it will be a huge benefit to the teachers.

We also began to refurbish another of the school buildings so it can become a library and we donated a few books at the closing ceremony along with a full netball kit. Alongside the building work and playing with the children we donated plastic sheeting to an elderly lady to help waterproof the roof on her 6 foot by 6 foot mud hut "house".

We struck up a great relationship with the children. Whether it was a game of football dutifully refereed by Alex and Ed or a game of netball with the girls (with some dubious rules) the children were constantly laughing and smiling- trying on our sunglasses, carrying our water bottles and taking countless photos, which we will bore you with soon. They certainly made our stay fun and incredibly exciting, if not very tiring; hence the 8.30 bed times!

Now we have just begun our time in Pensulo our joy to be here is as strong as ever, and we our excited to start our next project, refurbishing a feeding centre amongst other things. We cannot wait to begin the new project and the second half of our trip. We are having so much fun in this amazing country!

Tionana!

Hello from Malawi!!

Almost into our last week of Malawi and we are all still having an amazing time! We have almost finished refurbishing the feeding centre and its kitchen and the boys have been keeping up their carpentry skills with refurbishing the desks for the primary school. The villagers are extremely friendly and always try their best with speaking English to us and trying to teach us Chichewa as well. Ida is cooking us some traditional African dishes such as nsima, veg and kidney beans and even being treated to mandasi which has been going down a treat.

Last Sunday we climbed Michiru Mountain, so an early start was in order to climb to the peak before the hot midday sun was out. The climb was tiring but the view at the top was completely worth it with a stunning bird's eye view of Blantyre and other villages – we could even see Chilingani in the distance! This week has mainly consisted of painting and liming the feeding centre and in our spare time creating educational posters on important issues such as: HIV/AIDS, health and hygiene, Malaria and the benefits of staying in school.

The plan for next week is to spend the first few days decorating the interior of the feeding centre with things such as the alphabet and numbers and then rounding off the end of the week and our time in Malawi with a trip to Lake Malawi for a relaxed few days before flying back home.