...Next Steps.

Saturday 7th November: So what's next? We'll be back in Lilongwe in eighteen months with the third years. It'd be fantastic if MADSOC had been bought for Tfac by then. We spend the morning talking about ways to support and the idea begins to grow that together with Tfac we could work to raise the funds to buy the space and rename it the CTC (Community Theatre Centre.) It would mean that our students would take performance work out to perform there and this would provide the prompt for a week of exploration and workshop. The £80,000 needed to purchase the space seems manageable, particularly if our St Mary's students feel they have a stake in the building. It's hugely important to find the right material to take to Malawi, but if we are, in part, heading out to celebrate the new centre then there's a genuine and immediate focus. It's important to start now. How to organise?

The plane was two hours late leaving and only just missed another huge storm, which seemed about to sweep across the airport as we left the runway and headed north, back towards Ethiopia. I tuned out a bit and watched the in flight movie (500) Days of Summer - which was perfect travel fodder, soft and quirky. Once we'd changed planes at Addis there was nothing to do but sit back and wait for a morning arrival. In and out of sleep, we drifted silently over the neon constellations of towns in Sudan, Egypt, Libya and then out across the Mediterranean and back to Europe in time for breakfast.

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