Working with Schools in Zomba

July 28th, 2007 by mas | Filed under Africa & Overseas, Education & Skills.

We travelled to Malawi intending to use a similar model to the one we’d used in Tanzania - working with an International School to do work with children from local schools. This time though we wanted to be a bit more adventurous with our training!

We started by doing some group development activities with children from the International School. One of the biggest challenges here was that Malawian culture still has a very traditional approach to men & women. When we got onto talking about leadership and asked a group to decide upon a leader, I asked them why they’d decided on their leader - what qualities did this person have? “Well he’s a boy” came the ‘obvious’ answer along with an obvious kind of shrug!! (This despite the fact that the people who were really making all the decisions were both girls!).

The next stage of our training was to use a Prospective Sheet. Our aim here was to link the use of Prospective towards consideration and understanding of the environment (at the request of the school). It was a very interesting process, hearing about how aware (or not) children were of the circumstances of children outside of their own circle - one girl who lived less than 500 yards away from the school had never actually walked to school. Every day she was driven in a 4×4 vehicle and its from there that she gained her perspective of life in Zomba.

Both the groups we worked with came up with interesting project ideas - one was to organise a theatre performance at the school & charge entry for tickets with proceeds to be donated to a local orphanage. The second group decided on organising a fun/gala day - again to raise funds to be donated to an orphanage. Of course neither of these particularly met the ‘green agenda’ but in my opinion both indicated a concern for the local environment and the people living there. The thing about Prospective is that its a process that results in outcomes determined by the users - its not possible to manipulate the outcome - so frustrating as it may be, what people decide at the end of it is what they want to do!

The final part of our training with the International Students saw us using the Outline resource to help them project manage their ideas. This was the first time we’d used Outline so we had all sorts of questions. As a resource it was excellent! There was no question that through the session the children had a very comprehensive knowledge of what they would need to do and how much work would be involved if they were to achieve their project ideas.

Having trained up the children from Sir Harry Johnston School we then delivered two days of training with children from two local schools. We used group development activities, sports, games and then a day of arts and performing arts sessions leading to them making short film clips on their hopes & ambitions (you can see some of these in the main Malawi Film).

Undoubtedly the training was much more challenging than that we delivered in Tanzania and we definitely felt we had achieved much more. However at the very end I was again left with the feeling that we could have gone a step further - this time it was a conversation with one of the teachers from the local schools. He came to talk with me and said he was aware we were doing some work with the Grace Orphan Project and he was interested because he also did some work with an orphanage - “We don’t need money - we know money is not the answer to our problems, what we need is ideas and inspiration so that we can solve our own problems, we need motivation”. So off we went to give him a crash course in using Prospective & Outline all the while wishing we’d done this with the local schools as well as the International School.