Wednesday 3rd May

The planning is over. The wheels touch down in Blantyre and we have arrived.

Which is more than can be said for our luggage.

Because we are not seasoned travellers, we do not know that this is quite normal. For a moment I start to think 'if our luggage can't even get here, what hope does our container full of thousands of footballs have?' It's a fair question and one that we will deal with tomorrow, not today.

Sylvia meets us at the airport. She doesn't know us and we don't know her. She works in a school in Blantyre and called us when she heard what we were planning. Sylvia is ageless - if I had to guess I'd say mid-50's but if you said 40 or 65 I wouldn't be surprised.

When I tell her about our luggage she shrugs it off with an air of experience and expectation that comes from living so many years in Africa. I don't think anything would faze Sylvia. She has a calm air about her and welcomes us immediately to Malawi. Her Malawi.

Before we even get a chance to drop what few items of hand luggage we do have at the hostel, Sylvia turns right instead of left out of the airport and suggests we go and visit a local primary school a few kilometres up the road.

A few kilometres from Heathrow is Hammersmith. A few kilometres from Chileka airport is the baron untouched of Malawi's outback. The tarmacked road turns almost immediately into a red dust track. It is clear that city life is in the other direction.

The village we go to is remote. But Malawi is densely populated around Blantyre and every stretch of the road is lined with people tooing and froing on their daily business. Some wave when they see us, but most are commuting. Women multi-task with bowls of grain balanced professionally on their head, babies strapped to their breasts feeding as they walk, and hands free to gesticulate enthusiastically.

What makes a school a school? Malawi pares it down to the absolute basics. Teachers, children and a place to congregate. The red brick huts have holes instead of windows. They have a floor instead of chairs. A wall instead of a blackboard.

The school is empty but for the headmaster and a few of his colleagues. They greet us enthusiastically before they even know us. How different this is to England. To show us how important our visit is to them, they invite us into their office. They are proud of their school and I get a rush of blood, excited about how this might all feel when filled with children.

We explain what we are doing in Malawi and promise to return with footballs as soon as our container has cleared customs.

This afternoon we visited three schools all within a 1km radius. All of them showed us around, invited us into their 'offices' for a chat and told us how much the children would love to have footballs to play with. Every school had a football pitch. A bit of scrubland measured out to size, lines raked in the dirt and goalposts made from timbers. Not one of the schools had a proper football and the thought of seeing the pitches alive with kids running around made me smile.

We return to Blantyre before it gets dark. Like everything in Malawi, our accommodation is basic but friendly.
Sylvia helps us out by offering us the loan of a couple of sleeping bags and a spare t-shirt for the morning, a gesture that she didn't have to do but one that makes us very grateful.

Malawi sleeps and wakes early so by 9pm we are in bed looking forward to tommorrow and our the excitement of whether our container full of footballs has reached Malawi - or wherher it has got lost somewhere in Zimbabwe.

How exciting.