ok, so this is going to be a long one!!

as some of you know, for the last two and a half weeks i have been in Malawi painting at Malosa school.
By painting i mean decorating not art!! we painted the lockers in the boys dorms and the walls of some of them. We had an hours talk from dulux on paint one part going a bit like this,
"what do you use to paint a ceiling?" Pause, we exchanged looks "Ceiling paint!"

obvious really! and the rev (reverand Hillel one of the teachers who took us) fell asleep in the talk in front of us all, hilarious!!

The amount of poverty in Malawi is immense. I'll try and put up some photographs to show it, but its not the same as experiencing it. Lots of my digi photos havn't come out well so I have fingers crossed that my B+W ones will be good. Those will have to wait a while cos i need a darkroom, which i wont till september when we're back at school!

The girls dorms at Malosa where a state, the sinks in the bathrooms were falling off the walls and the other sinks were just horrible, I'll be putting up photos of the conditions that the girls live in.

The girls dorms are quite a long way from the main school building but the boys used to be there. However, a few years ago a boy was bullied and was locked in a locker (they are wardrobe sized lockers) over the holidays, the parents came to the school to look for him, he was dead when they found him. theres a grave up there its quite chilling!.

I'll stop telling you tales of malawi now! theres too much to tell! but consider this:

2 or 3 in 5 malawians dont live to 5 years old

a child under 12 will probably have had malaria 2 or 3 times a year for most of their life

Everyone we met in malawi had lost a family member, to any number of illnesses. Most of the children had lost one or more parent and a sibling.

Everyone in malawi probably knows some one who knowingly has HIV and also someone who unknowingly has HIV

St Lukes hospital that we visited has run out of; pregnancy tests, tests for malaria, are running low on blood tests for HIV and the only antibiotic is penicillin.
They are considering following in the footsteps of another hospital and telling patients who need an operation to buy a small bottle of methalated spirits, so that the insision area can be cleaned and so the the surgical equipment can be too.

Driving down a road for 10 minutes i counted 5 funeral parlors, in a rural area.

just something to think about

XXX