Now that we are in the midst of this work and see how closely connected villagers are to each other despite vast distances between them separated by miles of planting fields, we decided to devote two days each to the two other nursery schools connected to Tiyambe Nawo, a community based organization which ties thousands of people together.

On Monday and Tuesday we visited an Orphan Care school, about a 30-minute walk from the Benesi’s home.  I didn’t know what to expect, but I did anticipate that one village would not have two main centers like the one where we spend our days.  Plus most of the schools we’ve passed on our drives around Malawi have looked simple, a brick building with one or two rooms, maybe a chalkboard and usually no furniture.

This little school was not made of brick or clay, but rather of bamboo and straw, standing by long thin tree branches.  Five women joyfully dancing, clapping, and singing greeted us upon our arrival.  It was a mini version of the welcome we received on our first day in the village, and the women’s faces were familiar.  They were a part of that earlier crowd.  This tiny school with no walls, one teacher, and about a dozen others standing outside watching was full of about 40 (some of them pictured below) smiling faces.

And it’s no wonder.  This woman, this teacher, Maggie, was amazing.  She had nothing to work with, aside from a garbage bag full of some stuffed animals, small pads of paper, some foam balls and two dirty ripped posters with letters of the alphabet that she hung on the sides of the straw school.  And as for those few materials, she carries them and her own child back and forth between her home and school, everyday.  A school with hardly any physical materials was simultaneously so rich with those things that are intangible – with love, excitement, energy, and passion that spilled into the babies’ own enthusiasm to be at school. What I saw was a teacher with presence and with credibility, one who was more than willing to allow us to teach the kids and model activities she could replicate.  She didn’t necessarily follow a consistent structure, something we later helped her establish, but she ran the show and the students responded.  Watching her in action really reminded me of how truly impossible it is to judge a school by its building.  What matters most, everywhere, is the quality of teaching.

I was so moved during these two days, moved by the power of a teacher and the way her presence filled an empty, fragile shelter.  It didn’t surprise me that I felt a longing to spend more time there.  But I’m focused on the desire to leave something tangible and to do so, I need to resist, as difficult as it is, the desire to spread our efforts too thin.  Instead, we met with the teachers and other women with a vested interest in their school to advise on how they could make even more activities using the materials they find in nature – we had the children use sticks to draw in the dirt, giving them a canvas to get creative, and we used their clothes to teach colors, the amount of children present to review numbers.  This conversation – again translated by Diana – was so worthwhile, especially after the chance we had to model the strategies and activities at school.  We plan to meet with all of the teachers in Tiyambe Nawo a few more times before we leave.

And of course, I am still thinking about those children.  They were beautiful, so happy, so responsive and full of life.  I kept snapping pictures of them because I wanted to capture their energy framed forever in my heart.  As I began to walk back through a landscape more stunning than you can imagine, so trying to hold on to what I saw over the past two days, including a child who spent a solid hour sitting on my lap, I left my camera in the school.  Only a few steps later, a little girl ran up to me and held out my camera in her hand.  She didn’t speak English but her quick movement and facial expression said enough.  How easy it would have been to leave that behind, and yet how natural it was for this baby to give back what doesn’t belong to her.  I don’t mean to make it sound at all as though I expected her to want to keep the camera, but I just couldn’t help but feel this overwhelming sense of awe in the little school that had both nothing and everything within it’s straw walls, sheltered by a bamboo roof.

The children, they take care of each other where ever we go.

And of course, kids are kids.  These two were especially hilarious, silently rolling around each other for enough time for us to snap several pictures.

Quite the downward facing dog…form is amazing.  You go girl!