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Slotland.com's
Development Projects in Malawi
Entire
Village Involved in Planning, Building, Maintaining
and Operating Umodzi-Mbame School
School’s
gardens feed students and teaches modern agricultural
techniques
 When
the Project Team began their work in the small Malawi
village of Juma in 2005, their first task was to understand
the needs of the community they’d be working in and
to involve the entire community in developing solutions.
 The
Project Team decided to form an NGO (non-governmental
organization) which will support only such rural community
groups which started some development efforts by themselves
without other NGO or government interventions, and now
need to spread but don’t have the means or capacity
to do it. The name of this project’s NGO is boNGO,
which stands for Based on Need-driven Grassroots
Ownership.
 Malawi
is a small country with more than 600,000 children orphaned
by AIDS. Education is the key to combating the disease
but, with the closest school so far away, and so many
of the village’s children responsible for raising their
younger siblings, school was not an option. It was clear
that a school and community were critically needed.
 Volunteers
worked through an especially stormy rainy season to
construct a school building and create a garden to feed
the children in its care. During construction, the Project
Team trained teachers and organized an Executive Committee
to manage the facility. A Parents Committee was chosen
and trained to support the teachers with their daily
duties and to prepare the food (porridge).
 "We
couldn't just give them a building and expect them to
be able to operate a school," said the Team leader.
"We felt we had to see it through, so we made sure
the villagers were prepared to be self-sufficient."
An
expert with World Vision trained the Committee in the
areas of leadership, community mobilization and sustainability.
Soon after the training, the Executive Committee members
started to organize their villages to come and help
with finishing the school building.
It is a long process," said the team leader.
"New
unexpected things always appear, such as rats chewing
the cables of the project car and preventing us from
buying needed cement on time, or regularly drunk chiefs
of certain villages who don't allow a decent dialogue
or cooperation. But slowly we got there."
 Classes
began for 116 students in October 2006. The school’s
opening ceremonies began a new era of hope for Malawi
villagers. Local stakeholders, including school teachers,
church representatives and doctors, as well as traditional
authorities from the area and the local Member of Parliament
participated in the festive event. Entertainment included
traditional dances, drums and singing.
 "We
are following two guiding principles," said Tereza,
the Project Manager. "The project must directly
respond to the needs of the community. And it must be
built and managed by the local people in order for them
to feel a sense of ownership and responsibility."
In
January the children came back to school after the Christmas
holidays. The teachers started introducing the topic
of numbers, using different new teaching methods that
they had acquired during the training conducted for
them (and 13 other teachers from surrounding preschools)
in the middle of December.
 Every
school day, three parents come to fetch water, prepare
meals for the children, and wash dishes. For the meal
we serve rice porridge with milk, and twice a week crushed
groundnuts are added. It is a good contribution towards
a balanced diet, for at their homes the children mostly
eat corn as their staple. In 10 out of the 12 villages
in which we work community gardens were allocated and
are being cultivated. Volunteers have planted sweet
potatoes, beans, groundnuts, and corn. These crops will
be used to feed our pre-school children, and surplus
might be sold to generate extra income or may be given
to old and disabled people in the villages.
The
school’s garden has become a facility for training local
farmers in permaculture. Permaculture aims to achieve
the highest output from the lowest inputs, reducing
'overhead' and utilizing all 'waste' materials produced
from the system in order to live in a sustainable harmony
with the nature and environment around. At the school,
this means making use of all the excess or waste water
by harvesting and redirecting it to where it is needed,
encouraging the soil fertility through abolishing sweeping,
applying mulch and organic waste to protect and nurture
the soil, planting trees, bushes and grasses that avoid
erosion, provide food, natural medicine and beauty while
requiring little maintenance.
 UMODZI-MBAME
has become a model centre of its kind. The Team is currently
implementing and creating a newly developed Teaching
Manual to support and guide the teachers while teaching
the kids in a holistic, very child focused way - which
is quite different to the commonly found teaching methods
in this area of Malawi.
Monthly Teacher Training Sessions are offered to Umodzi’s
teachers as well thirteen additional pre-school teachers
from the surrounding area to ensure the effective implementation,
monitoring and evaluation of the manual.
Establishing
a model centre that motivates and inspires other surrounding
schools also means that we try to concentrate on the
use of local available resources when it comes to teaching
materials, school furniture and playground construction.
So the children enjoy playing with balls made from old
plastic bags; instead of posters and pictures, the school's
walls are painted with alphabet letters, number lines
and colourful pictures; and collections of sticks, stones
and seeds replace expensive counting materials.
From
the initial idea and Slotland.com’s commitment to fund
the project, to getting the entire village involved
(beginning with the village elders) building the school
through the rainy season, finding and training teachers,
establishing a self-sustaining garden and finally to
celebrating the first day of classes, the story of Umodzi-Mbame
has been told to the supportive Slotland.com community
through regular articles in the community’s newsletters.
Read those articles
here.
It
is because so many Slotland.com players have asked how
they can help more personally and directly that this
website has been created. We hope that you too will
be inspired by these stories and will donate whatever
you can to help.
News
releases issued by Slotland.com over the last two years
provide further information on how the Umodzi-Mbame
project has transformed a village and given a new chance
to a new generation.
Read Slotland.com news releases here.
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