At the end of August 2013, I retired from a 36-year career as a secondary school teacher. Coming up to my retirement, people often asked: “And what are you going to do now?”, and while I was chuffed at being seen as the type of person who would continue to do things, I was quite happy with my plans to do nothing.

However, the night before my last day in school (I hadn’t even retired yet), we had a visit from my husband Martin’s first cousin, Fr John Ryan. Fr John is a Kiltegan priest based in Mzuzu, Malawi. He mentioned that the Phelans had never visited him and before the evening was out, I booked flights to the Malawi capital, Lilongwe.

When my friend and fellow retiree Christine Burke heard about the trip, she said she was coming with me.

I had met Christine and her husband Jim in Zambia, when we spent time teaching there in the late 1970s. Jim passed away unexpectedly in April 2012 and Christine felt this answered a need to retrace their steps and revisit places she had visited with him.

Heading off

Fast forward to July, and Christine and I, escorted by the ever-patient Martin, are checking in at Dublin Airport. The lovely Shane Manning at the desk took a very understanding attitude to our six heavy suitcases, and 20 hours and three flights later we were greeted by the hustle and bustle of Lilongwe.

On our five-hour journey to Mzuzu, we took in the sights – brightly coloured chitengis (traditional cloth women wrap around their waists and use to attach babies to their backs), beans, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, onions, tomatoes and wooden toys, being sold on the side of the road. Women walking extremely gracefully, despite carrying impossible loads on their heads.

We later learned that Malawi produces tea, coffee, rice, sugar cane, cassava, tobacco, groundnuts and beans. In Mzuzu, we were quite near Auction Holdings, where farmers delivered their tobacco early in the morning, hoping to get a good price.

People work very hard to eke out an existence from subsistence farming. Tractors are a rare sight and there are very few tarred roads.

Travel with purpose

However, we weren’t here just to soak up the culture. We travelled over specifically to help develop Lusekelo School of Computing, which is attached to an NGO called Ungweru.

Ungweru was set up by Fr John in 2004 and is a non-denomenational organisation which mission is “to improve the quality of life for vulnerable groups in Northern Malawi”. It is supported by Irish organisation Misean Cara. It serves 13 communities and works across the areas of education, HIV/AIDS management, child protection, youth empowerment, food security, natural resources, water and sanitation. There is also a spiritual dimension.

We raised €3,500 to buy a photocopier, textbooks and other resources for the school before coming over. We did this by holding a tea party in Camross that was supported very generously by friends, family and neighbours (and where Cork-based Motown band the Papa Zitas provided the entertainment free of charge). This meant we could hit the ground running when we got there.

We started work at 7.30 each morning and on the way to school little children called out to us practicing their English: “Msungu (this is how they describe white people) how... are... you?” Then ducking behind their older siblings when we answered them, highly amused by us and a little bit scared until they got to know us.

We worked with Emmanuel Mhango, the head of the school who recently graduated with a degree in Computer Science, and were assisted by three tutors, Chimwemwe, Patrick and Bernard, who work very hard as volunteers. The most important aspect of our work was to mentor these tutors so that the work would continue when we went home. We taught job preparation skills, keyboarding, word processing, databases, spreadsheets and computer theory.

We thought the best way to help develop Lusekelo was to set up the school as a City & Guilds examination centre. We followed City & Guilds syllabuses and while we haven’t yet been accepted as a centre, we’re still working on it.

Chris (who had worked as a primary teacher) ran a drama school in the afternoon, teaching English to younger children through music and drama, and put on a concert at the end of our stay. It was all very Sound of Music, as I woke up in the mornings to the sound of children singing: “Doh, a deer, a female deer.”

We demanded high standards, and the students responded with enthusiasm. They were very eager to learn and appreciated the opportunity to improve their skills. We were amazed at how much could be achieved in such a short time.

At the end of the six weeks we presented the students with a Lusekelo School of Computing Centre of Excellence Certificate.

Music and mass

As well as being friendly, mannerly, welcoming and courteous, the Malawian people themselves are quite spiritual, starting and ending meetings with prayers.

Their masses, which are a mix of singing, swaying bodies and the rhythmic beat of the drum, are amazing.

We also attended an ordination ceremony, lasting four and a half hours, that was a huge celebration of the welcoming of a new priest into the church. It was fabulous to see the devotion, energy, colour, music, rhythm and dance (there were priests and bishops dancing too) that we hardly noticed the time passing.

I learned from my time in Malawi that the most important resource in any school is qualified experienced teachers – both primary and secondary. There are a lot of retired teachers whose experience and skills would be very welcome. Even teachers who are not retired might like to come out during their summer holidays.

Interested people can check out the website, or can can contact me at jomphelan@eircom.net.

The future

So where to from here? There’s plenty to do in Lusekelo. We need to rearrange the room so that we can enrol more students. This means putting in proper computer desks, replacing computers and buying additional ones. We also need a new floor.

Our bigger vision for the school is to develop it into the most highly-regarded IT school in the northern province, if not Malawi, and I believe that this is possible.

Our aim is to reach a stage where employers will be very impressed by anybody holding a certificate from Lusekelo. We are at the preliminary stages of linking with a third-level college in Ireland so we’re very optimistic about the future.