Malawi has the nickname 'the warm heart of Africa' and Malawians are genuinely friendly towards tourists and strangers, they go out of there way to help, and will smile and laugh over mis-understandings and simple conversations about normal life. Maybe its the best way for them to face life in Malawi, here the average life expectancy is 40, there is a huge HIV/AIDS epidemic, malaria and malnutrition is an everyday problem, TB and cholera are still present and the medical facilities are, well, for example a Dutch medical volunteer we met told us at the hospital she worked at the doctors didn't have those little torches for inspecting inside ears, checking eye responses and the back of throats. They improvised and used the light given off from their mobile phones. On the bus the other day we drove past a group of children waving frantically at our bus. We waved and smiled back at them and their reaction was amazing. It set them off into a frenzy of break-dancing, jumping up and down, clapping, smiling and waving back. No-where else in the world have we seen locals with such a display of complete and pure joy at the fact a strange muzungo waved at them. About half of the muzungo's we meet in Malawi had been involved in volunteering with countless NGO's. So far we have talked to people who have been; mid-wives, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, teacher trainees, nurse training, preventing AIDS, introducing permaculture and twinning schools. Its a really passionate and controversial subject, everyone has a strong opinion and you can see why. We heard projects that have had amazing success, some that have made many mistakes and taken the long way around to reach a goal and others that have started, failed and disappeared leaving a void in the community. We contacted a small charitable organization in Nkhata bay, a small town in the North of Malawi, along the lake shore, and asked them if they need any volunteers.We picked 'Africa Unplugged' because it was run and staffed by Malawians who didn't want a thousand pounds each up-front or a minimum three month commitment and were quite happy to accept us for one week. So we took the bus from the Lake of Stars festival up to meet the Managing Director, Happy Ngwira. Nkhata bay is a small town typically Malawian with dusty red roads mixed with patches of tarmac, plenty of litter blowing around the streets, a largish market selling second hand clothes, typically t-shirts depicting slogans along the lines of 'YMCA Oregon Summer Camp 2004'. Craft stalls run by guys who remember your name and never fail to shout it out each time you pass and invite you to have a look at their stuff. It makes me laugh when everyone in the craft stalls is an "artist" and thay all say they have 'just painted these new pictures for you to see", because funnily enough they have identical paintings to every single other rolled up canvas painting in Malawi. Malawians sadly lack any imagination and the idea of creating a unique product to sell, maybe its better and safer just to copy everyone else. On Friday morning we walked into town to find the AUP (Africa Un-Plugged) office. Inside the small office, papered with descriptions of the projects, their aims, results and reminders sat Happy who welcomed us in and explained they currently support four main grassroots projects in the area: A permaculture garden. A womens football team. A widows group who make arts and crafts and dry out fruit for storage. Support and activities towards a number of the local schools. Happy is about 35 and you can tell he has a genuine heart for helping his community. He has been em-powered by a couple of British guys, Phil and Chris, who now direct and finance the charity from the UK. Happy is supported with his field director, his ever present side kick, the young and friendly, Jomoh. Jomoh is 19 and also has a heart for helping his community. He tells us stories of his school days and when Jomoh agrees with something I say he smiles and says 'Yes Dan!' and raises his hand for the common Malawian handshake. Slap hands together, locking thumbs, slide down to a regular handshake and slide back to locking thumbs together. No conversation would start or finish without a Malawian hand shake. We talk with Happy and Jomoh for about an hour, Happy stops in the middle of a conversation to pray for us, and at the end Kat decides to offer her assistance to one of the local primary schools and I sign up to help in their permaculture garden. We leave and agree to a tour of the gardens the next morning at 7am. We meet Jomoh at the office the next morning to show us how to walk to the gardens, 2kms out of town. We walk to a small village called Silva, a group of about ten mud brick houses, this is where Happy lives and from one of the houses an older women comes over to us. She is Happy's mum and we greet her in the local language, Chichewa. Muli bwanji? (how are you?) and she howls with a laugh and begins a really funky dance routine in front of us. As she dances she replies; Ndili bwino, kayaino? (I'm fine, and you?) We reply Ndili bwino and shake hands. She is really excited we have shown some respect and learnt to speak a tiny amount of Chichewa, so we can't leave till we have been offered food, fish and nsima? Having no desire to force the tasteless Malawian polyfilla into our stomachs at 7:30 in the morning, we pass making excuses about having just eaten. Instead she collects a carrier bag and plucks fresh fruit from the trees around her house and hunts for anything lying around the house. We leave with two giant papayas the size of rugby balls, two custard apples, a corn on the cob and a yellow tomato. At the garden Happy and Jomoh show us the different vegetables growing. In each bed they have a marigold plant, "to attract the right type of insects". They group different vegetables together, green bean next to sweetcorn, depending on what effect the plant has on nitrogen levels in the soil (or something like that, sorry I've forgotten what they told us). It did sound all very interesting and they were very keen about growing vegetables without pestecides. After the visit is over we say goodbye and promise to visit Happy's church the next morning to see a fake wedding. "As you are the only person with a camera, feel free to move around the church taking pictures", Happy whispers to me. Having been promoted from guest to official wedding photographer, and if being a rare muzungo in a rural church wasn't already a huge distraction, Happy was prodding me over to kneel next to the alter and face down the isle at the scowling groom and distracted bride. It was a fake wedding because the groom was about nine years old and no older that the bride. The Church needed to raise some funds for a kids church day out and wanted to exercise the Malawian tradition of during a wedding, people give their wedding gifts, typically money, or sugar and tea in a public offering, in front of the congregation and newly weds. Someone holds a giant tray, everyone sings (amazing voices!) and one by one everyone shuffles forward to drop their prezzie on the tray. The father of the groom was milking the audience, he danced around the tray repeatedly throwing in a loads of 20 Kwacha notes (8p each). I took addresses from lots of people and made promises to post them the photos and four hours later, during another hymn we sneaked out the side and went back to the lake for a cooling swim. On Monday morning, the first day of our volunteering I left Kat at her school: Kat- Lakeside Primary Private School sits on the side of a dusty hill in Nkhata Bay and the only thing to identify it as a school is the small rusty sign standing outside. The school has 1 main room used for assembly and the nursery class, a staff room and the head's office, the 4 other classrooms all lead off a corridor in the derelict building behind the nursery. The entire school building would have been condemned centuries ago in the UK. It looks as if the builders gave up half way through the job and then 100 years later sent in the demolition team, who also gave up half way through. I am introduced to Peter Kampanga, the head teacher. He's a happy, friendly guy who tells me that private schools are the poorer schools in Malawi. Like England the parents are supposed to pay the fees every term, around 8 pounds, but very often they can't afford to; the system is that the kids aren't kicked out of the class but reports are withheld. If the kids dont pass the year they are held back to repeat it, so classes are an odd assortment of all ages. They have exams for the week so I'm asked to invigilate a Year 4 maths exam tomorrow, "Fab, my favourite subject" I reply with just a hint of sarcasm. So, the next morning I turn up at school at 7.30am and already it's boiling hot. The kids all play with sticks and the fallen tree in the playground/rubble area. We have assembly together, Peter shouts at the children whilst they shout at each other all eating their breakfast, a local sugary, luminous bubble gum - the whole scene is a teacher's worst nightmare. I take my Year 4 class to their room, there are 5 wooden desks and 6 children so one takes his usual spot on the floor, pen and paper in hand. I'm told that the whole school will start exams at 8am, by 8.30 it sounds like a fight has broken out in each and every classroom. A boy in my class finishes his exam and I tell him to take it to the teacher next door who will be marking it. 2 seconds later he returns with the teacher, the teacher tells me to check the children's answers and get them to repeat any that are wrong. I look at him in disbelief and repeat what he's told me to check that I understood, when really I want to ask him "so you want me to help them cheat to pass their end of year exam?" The next few days I invigilate more exams and take a couple of English lessons. In the Year 2 exam as I tell the kids to start, one of them picks up a razor blade and begins to sharpen his totally blunt 5cm long pencil. I give him my Biro and he grins at me, grins at the pen and then at all his mates around him. The children only learn through repertition here and have text books for everything, even expressive arts. They just copy from the board and repeat everything they've been told. So when I take Year 1 for an English lesson I teach them the song heads, shoulders, knees and toes. The scene in front of me is a sea of bewildered faces, they just don't understand that a teacher would jump around in front of them singing and waving hands all at once and then expect them to as well. Finally they get it and join in enthusiastically, slapping parts of their body and singing something that resembles that well known song. Each classroom consists of a few wooden benches or desks, modeled on the Victorian era style. The walls are covered in mud and dirt, the floor is disintegrating and none of the classrooms have doors, it is a very depressing sight. During the week I decide to make some posters to try and brighten up the rooms in some small way. Using huge rice bags and marker pens I hang out in the hostel and make times table charts, pictures accompanied by the English words and number and alphabet charts. I'm not a natural artist and I'm in the middle of drawing what should resemble a dog when Bomix a local artist walks in. We get chatting and I recruit him to make some more posters, they look great and the teachers are well pleased but can't put them up till the new year in case they are stolen. Friday is the final day of school for the year before a 3 month holiday. Peter leads a whole school assembly which is only slightly less rowdy than normal. There's no system of sitting in class rows here and a fight breaks out at the back of the room, Peter simply raises his voice and carries on talking as the nursery teacher splits up the kids who start again moments later. Dan gets invited to make a speech to the school, and I read out my Year 4 class exam results and a rowdy rendition of heads, shoulders, noses, toes and something else we send the kids off home and us teachers head for the staff room. They love soft drinks here and they often replace water, we toast the end of the school year with 2 fantas, 1 sprite and a coke each plus a tonne of biscuits. Whilst drinking everyone is asked to make a speech which is all a bit surreal and as there are 9 of us this takes quite some time - perhaps those soft drinks are to keep us all awake. All express gratitude for a job, for fanta, of course, and for donations and help from AUP. I follow suit and thank them all for allowing me into their crazy world for a little while. After volunteering in the school for a week I was actually glad that I hadn't committed to teaching there for any longer. The effect upon me of watching the school, seeing the teacher's use a stick as a discipline technique, the way the children only learn through copying from a book and the decrepid state of the school made me realise that if I had volunteered for longer, with our western methods of teaching, it may have highlighted the failings of the schools particular teaching methods, that the school is basically run as those were in Victorian times. I think teaching there briefly and then leaving may just create a void, the teachers and children would realise their short comings and the pupils would have discovered how badly their teachers behave and the teachers how poor their training was. On reflection it sounds neagtive to say I'm glad I didnt teach, but it wouldn't be the best way to help the educational problems in Malawi. It made me realise that if anyone really wanted to help with teaching in Malawi then being a volunteer in a teacher training college environment would be a hugely more beneficial as you would be teaching teachers more creative methods. So thats what Kat experienced in her school time - back to Monday morning and I'm off to the Big blue hostel for a cup of tea with Alice. Alice has been a volunteer with AUP for a while but has taken over running Big blue because the owner had gone to hospital and was going to missing for a week or two. I spent most of my week hanging out in Big blue with Alice and another volunteer Rachel. I never visited the garden again after our first tour, and it was never mentioned again by Happy or Jomoh. I came to realise that the garden wasn't a project that needed a volunteer at this point in the year. The garden was full, the plants were established and growing, and as Happy lived next door he did the watering and kept the weeds at bay. Instead Alice and I talked about marketing AUP, a very foreign idea to Malawians is how to go about marketing. AUP continues to receive volunteers thanks to efforts in the UK and a small listing in the last Lonely Planet. Alice suggested I produce an A4 poster that explains who AUP are, that could go into all the hostels in Malawi. Luckily the owner had left behind a laptop which had a version of photo shop, so I spent most of the week designing a poster. At the end of the week, Happy and Jomoh took us into their office and we graduated with a certificate, everyone made a speech and Happy sang a song for us. I had finished the poster and took the final image on a USB key down to the local internet cafe to print it out. Happy and Jomoh cam along eager to see what it looked like. Unfortunately the USB key had picked up a virus from the laptop and after two hours of trying to fix the problem it still refused to display any files or folders. I never got to see Happy and Jomoh's reaction to the poster as Kat and I had to pack that evening to take a bus the next morning. On the whole we thought AUP is a good organisation, run and staffed by Malawians means it is successful with the local community helping plenty of grateful people in the town. AUP is financed by the UK directors fund raising efforts and without that cash flow the projects would have difficulty sustaining themselves, but also Happy and Jomoh's wages are public and they each receive the equivalent of 16 pounds, a month. So a little really does go a long way. On the bus early the next morning, just before we leave Nhkata Bay, the conductor stands in the corridor and says, "Now we are ready to leave but before we do, we must pray for the journey, who will pray?" Someone stands up and asks us all to bow our heads. "We pray for the driver, the bus, the road, safety on the journey and that we all arrive, on time!" Everyone laughs and the driver revs the engine and shoots off. Cooper Out to Mozambique in a few days Love Dan & Kat