Saturday 22 September 2012

Two Azungu, an Amputee and an Albino walk into a Pharmacy . . .

Hi All!

This week had been pretty good:

Last Saturday, Mary, who's kind of our landlady and head of Nama Simba Nursery School, brought us a plate of Samosas! It made me so unbelievebly happy! They were super tasty and it meant we didn't have to cook dinner that night or lunch the next day.

Monday was our first day volunteering at Nama Simba Nursery School. Trying to control around 60 pre-school aged children is hard enough, but throw in a language barrier and a lack of toilets (and an apparent lack of knowledge of the latrine), and it's nice to know that they go home at one o'clock in the afternoon and you can relax for the rest of the day.

On Wednesday we went to Steph, Matilda and Georgie's house in Nancholi for lunch. We got a bit lost on the way there but it was so worth the wait, the chocolate banana cake (cooked on a hotplate!) was amazing! We've just bought the ingredients and plan to try out the recipe very soon! Afterwards we sat in on one of their projects, which is a women's group for the local community, and helped to make necklaces from lovely Malawian chitenje cloth.

On Thursday we taught an IT class in the Samaritan Trust's new computer suite. The students' task was to type up the following:

Dear Sir (or) Hospital,
My name is . . . . . . . . . . .  and I am looking for a job as a nurse. Are you hiring?
Thank You
Kind Regards
(Name)

It made me realise just how much I take being able to use a computer for granted! Some of the students in the class were the same age as me and yet it took them half the lesson to find Microsoft Word! It was really nice to be teaching them something that will be really useful to them in the future though, hopefully by the time I leave they'll be typing like pros!

Yesterday one of the older boys at Samaritan's got a deep cut in his finger and one of the younger boys had a pre-existing infected cut on his knee, so Catriona and I went along to the hopsital to help speed things up and find out where to go and what to do if we ever needed to take someone to the hospital by ourselves. Now Catriona and I already get stared at a lot because white people aren't very common around where we live, and the boy with the boy with the sceptic cut on his knee was hit by a car a while back and lost his other leg. So when the three of us walked into the busy hospital pharmacy and then an albino man (who was actually very nice and helped us when we got lost) came and stood behind us in the queue, I don't think there was one person in that room that didn't try to get a good look at us all.

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