Tours and trainings

On Friday we were given a tour of Lilongwe by the MAGGA GOLD team - who knew you could fit so much into a day! We started by driving to the new stadium. This was especially interesting for Ruth as it was not built last year. The stadium can seat 50,000 people and can be seen from all over Lilongwe. Unfortunately we could not go into the stadium to look around as it is still a building site but it would be interesting to see it in a few years time in action!

We then travelled to see a monument for the first world war and on to visit the parliament building and the mauseleum. The mauseleum was a memorial for the late president Banda. We had our lunch at an authentic hostel where you could stay in mud huts by the lake. The MAGGA team took us to the Lilongwe Wildlife centre in the afternoon and stopped at a village on the way home that is often frequented by Madonna on her trips to Malawi! We were exhausted by the end of the day!!

On Saturday we spent the day at our hostel preparing our training plans for the next week. In the evening we were invited to a fundraiser at MAGGA to subsidise fees for our camp at Senga Bay next week. It turned out not to be quite the English tombola fundraiser we were expecting - the music and dancing started early and we left when the party was in full swing!

On Sunday we started our training with patrol leaders in Lilongwe. The group turned out to have a mix of Brownies, Guides and Rangers but they were all very enthusiastic and gave some good contributions to our trainings on Advocacy and First Aid. Having done some of these activities before in Blantyre, it is interesting to see the different ideas that come up in our discussions. The activities went particularly well considering we were competing with at least 6 different church services at once throughout the day that were in different rooms around the school.

We have continued training these girls on Monday, running activities on Teamwork and Leadership. The girls were especially excited to play with our parachute, as it is something they have never seen before. Since our training with these girls has taken place in a school, today we got chance to meet a class who were having an English lesson in the classroom next to ours. We certainly caused a stir with our acivities and games when the school children came out for their break!

It has been a busy few days but it is really nice to see how much the girls have learnt from our trainings.

GOLD love,

Alice and Team Malawi x

P.S. Somehow we have managed to increase the amount of luggage we are carrying between hostels! Hopefully we can cut this lot back down again before we fly home...

(Ruth has been shopping!)