November 2018

… as Coldplay sang once.

The build of the extra classrooms, staff room and kitchen was not planned with the weather in mind. It’s raining. But really there should another word for the stuff that falls out of the sky at a ferocious clip. Everything stops when the heavens open—except our team of builders who seem to be impervious to the blistering sun and thrashing rain. If the job isn’t finished on time it won’t be for want of trying, and that includes the children in between classes.

Meanwhile School Lane (as it will soon be Christened) is a quagmire. Even trucks delivering materials get stuck in the mud and have to be pushed the last few hundred metres to the school. When they leave the drivers all utter the same refrain: ‘I’m not coming here again!’

One morning I noticed Vitalis preparing a stripped blue gum tree in the spot assembly is usually held.

‘What’s doing?’

‘I am making a new flagpole.’

‘What happened to the last one?’

‘The termites ate it.’

Mary gets a new Jiko stove to help cut down on the amount of firewood she has to cut for our lunches.

Mary is the first to wear our new school polo shirts with the uniform badge.

Despite all the building work going on around her, Mary continued to cook school lunches for everyone. The new Jiko stove should reduce the amount of firewood necessary to cook the beans and maize and provide a concentrated source of heat. We’ll see!

Meanwhile she fashioned the new school uniform (white for teachers; blue for children). The blue polo shirts should arrive in time for the start of the 2019 school year. Can’t wait.