Walk the World

Each year there is a fundraising promotional day for the UN world food program called walk the world. It happens all over the world on the same day-ish. The WFP feed nearly 600,000 children here in Malawi every single week across all of the districts!
I heard there was one school that has 3,500 students enrolled in a building that would accommodate a school of 300 at home. 1,000 children are educated inside this building while the remaining classrooms are under trees outside. Class sizes are massive, probably even worse than the 1:88 average (but that’s urban….rural probably kills that statistic!) Most schooling around the country is of a similar standard. The sign of an extremely well resourced, and well off school are those who have some chairs inside, a blackboard and each child has an exercise book along with a pencil for the year (one)!!! I heard that only 11% of schools have desks!! Crazy!! I guess you should expect stats like that for the 8th poorest country in the world. Still doesn’t make it right though. Especially when the front page of the newspaper today reported over 50% of government budget spending was unaccounted for in an audit of 2004-2005!!! That’s 30Billion kwacha missing… that’s why there aren’t any desks in schools. Have I mentioned corruption is a “bit” of an issue here?? oops… a little whinge there…sorry…!

The WFP have a great program of providing breakfast to students, and girls who attend school are given likuni phala (flour for porridge) for each family to take home. This is a way to provide for a family, but also encourage attendants of girls at school!

Anyway, back to the walk. Every year SOS takes a bus load of kids to attend, we walked the whole way with the army guys. They were hilarious! We quickly discovered walking wasn’t allowed. We marched and jogged and sang and chanted and laughed hysterically! We rarely managed the random stops for push-ups, but gave it our best shot! It was hot and dusty and hard work, but it was Awesome!!!! At the end we settled back at the oval for a performance of some local dances, childrens choirs, and guest appearances by Annie Matumbie and the Nyemba Nyemba boys…wohooo…. Not quiet Missy Higgins and U2…. but I still got to meet famous people! we danced like crazy, lots of fun!