Back to School - but not as we know it.

Couldn’t blog much yesterday, the internet went down half way through the day and didn’t come back again until early this morning. Such is life over here.


Poor Jedone has malaria again so he had to go home yesterday after the doctors. He has some pills to take but they definitely don’t take it as serious over here as we would, but then I do believe they have a much greater resistance to it than we do. Mainly I think because they are repeatedly exposed to it.

However, Gideon, Moffat and I did fight our way through the torrential rain to get to the school that they support in this area. The school is just basically a disused outhouse building. Which if it had been in this country would long since have been knocked down and new flats built on it! (Well maybe not given the area it is in!). The kids are all in this one large room and put in to different groups, based more on where they are in the education cycle than on age. In terms of equipment – well there’s not a lot. Only benches, which double up as desks and only two makeshift blackboards. Some of the kids have to sit on the floor so they rotate them round the benches and blackboards during the day!

The books went down a storm as you can imagine, both the new Teejay Maths books and the ones donated by Castlepark primary in Irvine. Although initially I think they were as fascinated by me as the books. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the first time some of them had seen a white person up close and for real!!

Needless to say lots of photos were taken, and I know these will receive a torrent of sarcastic comment from you guys back home. Yes that really is me surrounded by lots of little people!!

The teachers (all volunteers) thought I was just great for bringing the books over and were getting excited when they came across things they were teaching at the moment.

The arithmetic Xs table poster went down really well (courtesy of Carol’s sister at Greenwich Library) as they are obviously working through them just now.

And as ever the most important observation – they were all well behaved!

So how many pictures do you want to see of the kids?  I have loads!

Work felt slightly neglected yesterday so will need to make up for it today although I did set up some new spreadsheets!  However getting back in do the work did prove to be a bit of a challenge!