Scottish Invasion

Yesterday we had some special visitors at my school. A group from our partner school in Scotland spent the day with us.

Scotland and Malawi have a close partnership. There are so many schools and aid organizations from Scotland in Malawi. On my site visit last August I met a Scottish couple in the Boma that was raising funds to build a girls hostile. A couple weeks ago I met three university students from Scotland that were teaching Expressive Arts at the local primary school for six weeks. (Now all their students know the words to that song "And I would walk a thousand miles." A group of kids came up to me and started singing it, and were delighted when I joined in. It was pretty funny.)

Our partner school (which is not affiliated with the PC) is a Catholic high school in Scotland. They provided funds to build a laboratory at my school, provided books and science materials and sent sports equipment like footballs. They also fund a program at my school called Girls Go for Health which provides support for girls to stay in school, including free menstrual pads, tampons and ibuprofen.

We had about 25 visitors from the school, mostly female students. When their bus arrived, it created quite a stir at my school. So many azungus in one place!

First things first-- gotta take snaps. Cameras and photos are universally loved by teenagers, no matter what side of the world they are from.

The visitors observed classes in the morning. In my Form 3 Bio class we were finishing up our unit on Reproduction. The topic was problems of the reproductive system, which include sterility, maternal death and sexually-transmitted infections. Fun topic for a day we are having visitors, right? After my lecture I had the students work in their groups to answer questions about  STIs. The Scottish students assisted them.

After that, classes were suspended for the rest of the day so that everyone could play sports. There was football, netball, races and even volleyball. All equipment was provided by the Scottish partner school.

Below you can see some of the girls playing netball. Netball is like basketball except you don't dribble the ball. Also it is almost exclusively played by females.

In Malawi you always feed your guests, so our visitors were treated to a traditional meal of nsima with ndiwo (side dish). The ndiwo was some kind of local leafy green cooked with tomatoes and onions, maybe rape? I don't eat much nsima now that I cook for myself, so I always enjoy it when I have it. We also had Coca-cola and biscuits (cookies). Yum!

After that it was time for our visitors to be going. It was a really nice day and my students enjoyed spending time with the foreign students.

Fun fact-- did you know that the National Animal of Scotland is the unicorn?