End blog

Half term is here. It marks the end of a stint of being on duty for four weeks with no full day off (three consecutive duty weekends), which was quite a strain. During this holiday I'll mark exams and write over fifty reports, but I will also get away for a few days to Lake Naivasha, which will be a very welcome break.

The long rains finished quite surprisingly about ten days ago (a little early according to some, and yet there was far more rain in that period than is usual) and the weather is now extremely pleasant.

I've started getting rid of belongings by giving them away, ready for packing what remains into three suitcases! Most of my clothes and shoes are so worn out they are fit only for the bin. Clothes are worn out by a combination of the vicious washing powder and the sun, and shoes are worn out by being soaked and the rough pathways.

It has been a very interesting two years, with strange and unusual experiences. Perhaps never again will I have to put my foot down about teaching in a classroom with a dead and putrefying mongoose under the floorboards, or supervise prep sessions during which the power goes off three or four times, leaving me and forty pupils sitting in the dark together. Nor, I should think, will I be begged by a class of Year 7 pupils (thirteen year olds) to show them how Oranges and Lemons is played (it cropped up in Morpurgo's Private Peaceful, which we were studying) and spend twenty minutes of a lesson playing it! The pupils are such a curious mixture of immature and physically precocious, disciplined and riotous, rude and polite that I find it very difficult to describe effectively what it is like to be with them.

It is a strange position to be in, teaching the children of very rich people in a country where the majority of people are very poor and where corruption in government keeps them so. It isn't something I could get used to or feel comfortable with, notwithstanding the good work of the school charity, giving help to those on the other side of the electric fence to set up the centre for impoverished children.
However, I'm glad I came. Not sure what is next!