My first week at Mambwe Boarding School

I had said that this post would be about the house and garden however, since I can write about that at any time and won’t forget about it, I will be talking about my first week at Mambwe boarding secondary school.

I was rudely woken up by the neighbour’s many cockerels crowing at around 3:50 which was rather unexpected. I managed to go back to sleep despite them continuing to make noise all morning. In fact they seem to enjoy making noise all day and they only seem to stop when they go to their coup to sleep. It doesn’t get light here until around 6 in the morning and the sun comes up very fast so at 5:30, when I got up, it was still pitch black. We made ourselves porridge to eat and then got ready for school.

I had to iron some shirts before school since they got crumpled in my bag on the way here. We don’t have an ironing board so we just do it on a table. We were running a little late and, me being me, I got a quite worried when I realised we would be a couple of minutes late for the 6:50 staff meeting. As it turns out I didn’t need to worry, most teachers still hadn’t arrived by 7am and the meeting didn’t actually start until 7:10 due to the relaxed attitude of Zambians to timing. The head teacher introduced us to the staff who we had already greeted with a hand shake and the usual greeting of “how are you?”, “fine and you?”, “fine”.

After the meeting we went to the hall to address the students the head spoke for a while and introduced Andrew and I to the students. Then they sang the national anthem which was quite impressive with everyone singing a cappella.

The rest of the first day was rather confusing since it seemed nobody told us anything about what we would be doing, when to start or how to find out. We were eventually directed to the heads of department. Helpfully, the head of science wasn’t in and still isn’t. We were given the task of taking the previous volunteers classes for the first week since the new timetable was yet to be generated.

I found it quite surprising that we would be trusted to teach so early but I was excited to give it a go. As it turns out the timetable we were given initially was wrong so I kept trying to teach a class and then another teacher arrived to teach them a different subject. Despite the reports of large class sizes none of mine had more than 30 during that week. This was since many students can’t get to the school on time or don’t have the funds to pay at the start of term. All my classes now have over thirty or forty students which, surprisingly, doesn’t seem to make me worry.

I taught two grade 11 classes (year 12) and a grade 10 (year 11) class they were very respectful when speaking to me and, generally, remained quiet when I was talking to them which was reassuring as I was very worried that class discipline might get in the way of teaching.

Lunch is provided for staff at the school since all the children are boarding they have three meals a day provided so they just make extra for the staff at lunch. The lunch for students is always nshima and beans unless it’s Thursday then it’s rice and beans. Not baked beans although it is quite similar. We decided we didn’t really like nshima after this although we later realised that it was because we were not managing to eat the beans with the nshima as its very hard to pick up. This meant we were just eating nshima which is very plain, even the Zambians will admit that. I should mention it is traditional to eat nshima with your hands. First you take a small amount and roll it into a ball with one hand. It is extremely hot but I have been told that I will get used to it, as with many other things such as the temperature here. Then you make a small indent with your thumb in the ball and use this to pick up whatever is served with your nshima.

Below is a photo of what I had for lunch this week. The portion sizes here are very big since nshima is meant to fill you up. The staff have a scheme where they pay K100, around £7, per month to have some meat and vegetables to be cooked for us instead of beans. We are very thankful for this as the same thing for lunch each day can become a bit wearing.

The staff, with a few exceptions, are quite friendly. They are willing to help, usually on their own timescale but do help in the end. The previous volunteers were friends with two of the teachers in particular and Andrew and I were invited round to their house last Friday for a meal and went to a bar to play pool after which was exciting.

The temperature is something which I have  now managed to get used to. By get used to it really means you expect to be constantly sweating from around 8am till 8pm. I can get to 42 degrees here in October but at the moment it only gets to around 37 degrees between 12 and 3 it usually cools down to around 22 degrees overnight which now feels quite cool. It hasn’t rained here since we arrived and it probably won’t until the rainy season begins in late November.

I am now beginning to settle into the school routine and what I am doing is feeling normal. There are many more things to mention to life in Mambwe but I’ll save these for another time. I’ll leave you with a nice photo of a sunset above the great east road to Mfuwe.