Written by CorpsAfrica/Malawi Volunteer Ms. Assiatu Pongolani
Community Development work has always been my interest of work since I was young, while I was getting knowledge and skills from the youth organization I was working with before I joined CorpsAfrica. That knowledge stayed with me and I wanted to do more with it. I was also encouraged and had the confidence to study Community Development itself at college to dig deeper. I became very familiar with working with individuals of different backgrounds despite their culture, age, sex, disability, tribe, socio-economic status, religion, skin color, nationality, and of course political affiliations. Being a CorpsAfrica Volunteer now is helping me to continue exploring more of my community development knowledge and skills and also discover a lot of what I am good at and whom I like to interact with. In general, I am discovering my full personality.
My personality could be a starting point for my other paragraph because being a CorpsAfrica Volunteer here is helping me to learn a lot and be able to know how to handle people of all ages. I spend most of my time here at FOMO, (Friends of Mulanje Orphans). In the morning helping/ teaching nursery school kids and in the afternoon with youths. On themselves kids have a lot of expressions and want to discover a lot of things as they are growing. Recalling from my last blog, aduntu madam a Ku FOMO, a name that some kids call me, I never get angry or frustrated with them but rather keep smiling because I know they are kids. Even if fights happen in class, I just act as a mediator to them. This humanity in me is what I call myself being familiar with people of all ages.
Apart form helping/teaching the nursery school kids at FOMO, Grass Roots Soccer (GRS) has been mentioned in almost all my blog because it is the activity that I enjoy most with the youth. This is another group of people that I need to be smart when handling them otherwise they can make me fail or succeed because they are now going deeper in exploring the world issues. In my past experience I had an unexpected outcome that I had to restart with GRS project because I was not satisfied with their absenteeism. Most of them did not reach the expected number of topics for one to graduate with GRS. Through that I learned that one has to be tough enough in order to accomplish your objectives but am not saying with a 100%. So this time I have been strict that no matter what a number of participants I will have who at least attended eight topics and above I still graduate them with a graduation ceremony so that others should feel motivated and attracted.
To conclude with, community development work is fun and interesting. I get to interact with people from different standards of living. I became familiar with other peoples lives and of course as time goes by I am getting stable and now I call it home. Mulanje is now my second home away from home and my host family has turned into my second biological family and then my relatives all over the community. Kids, youths and adults have been my friends and they are notice and miss me when I am away. Mwina sindizapitanso kwathu (Maybe I will never go back home) hahahaha, ndikhala konkuno basi ine sindizapitanso kwathu (I will stay here)(joking)!!! Until my next blog zikomo kwambiri (thank you so much_ for following . Zabwino zikupitilira kubwera. (Good things keep on coming).
