COTN Malawi Interns 2009: July 2009

A few more Chiwengo pics

Tutoring in Chiwengo Village

One of the most significant aspects of the ministry that our interns do each day is tutor our children in Math, English, and Writing. The interns are divided into teams of two or three at the most with one national intern and one global intern spread out between standards 1 through 8 (1st through 8th grade in the US). The tutoring has been both challenging and quite rewarding.
Since our children come from village backgrounds, where education is generally not seen as all that important, many of our children find it difficult to study hard each day…Of course they are children. Who wants to study anyways when you have fifty other children to play with, plenty of things to do (coloring, playing with toys, running around, and various sports like soccer and net ball), and a group of 8 global and 7 national interns who want to play as well? With all this being said our tutoring has been extremely successful.
Each day at 2:00PM we gather the children into their groups and teach them until 4:00PM. Sometimes it is quite frustrating because they aren’t ready to settle down, but we have seen great strides in only a few weeks. Even after a week or so, the children began to show up at the right location and at the right time, which is quite a big deal…quite often 2:00 means 2:30 so those are great signs that something is going well.
Most importantly, tutoring has provided us an opportunity to get to know our children and has been an opening for deeper relationships. We do our best to teach them, but we know that learning is slow process that has to be continually cultivated. Our love however can take deep roots and tutoring has been one of the best places for our interns to express love and care for our children.

Our group...

Our group in Mtsilizia the first week. We just got back from a welcome program there today welcoming COTN's co-founders Chris and Debbie Clark. The energy and excitement among the villagers was pretty amazing to witness and be a part of.

Ben Meki is one of our fabulous returning national interns. He is an ABC (African Bible College) student with one year left. We had just come back from Mgwayi Village with kids and he was hungry so he yanked a carrot out of our garden and started eating it. He called himself Bugs Bunny. Ben keeps us all laughing and we are thankful to have him as part of our team!

His love is new every morning

Each day in Malawi brings something new; both exciting and heartbreaking. We were reflecting the other day on how tired we were and couldn't figure out why...and then we realized we love spending time with the kids and holding hands and singing songs and jumping rope and playing soccer and learning to read and...then it hit us! We are very energetic and emotionally involved when we are "on" and while it is so good, it is exhausting! Thankfully we are well fed and have a little down time scheduled between every activity.
At Mgywai we just started our second week of school. It is such a blessing to be met each day by eager students ready to learn and so happy to see us. We are seeing progress little by little and it makes the strife (of 50 1st graders in one class!) worth while.
We are waiting on specifics from the group at Chewengo, but rumor has it the girls are loving the kids and their jobs- Amen!
We are leaning on God daily and learning that though each day brings something new, His mercies never fail us.
Thank you for your prayers and kind words.

A few more of our lovely interns...

More of our fabulous interns

Above is a typical meal with rice, greens and we are spoiled with some chicken! Normally they would have nsima instead of rice! Photo credit for any food picture goes to Katie Patry so when all her friends ask her what she ate she can show them her collection of 100 photos!:)

Below are some more pictures and we will have more pic's from the Chiwengo group after this weekend!:) Thanks for following us and for praying for all that God is doing..."To God be the glory for the things that He has done."

Gracie showing the kids their faces after they have said, "one peek-cha." They know they can see themselves that way since they do not have mirrors!

Gordo as we call him has become the crowd favorite. He is a totally ham, similar to a little girl we were with last year named Dorlika. He loves on everyone and has a great spirit and smile!