School began this week – and suddenly the neighbourhood was a lot quieter, just like everywhere in the world. I spent all week working seriously on the next class – for recovery room / high dependency area nurses – which is starting tomorrow morning.
Monday morning last week was about as dismal as it could be – just pouring rain. I felt so sorry for the kids, walking miles in some cases to get to school. It was altogether a very wet week – no sun at all until Saturday. On Friday afternoon, we had almost 5 cm of rain in just over an hour. It was just as the kids were heading home from school, so 5 took shelter on my veranda, where I planned to leave them…..but then the wind started and the rain began to travel horizontally – so in they all came, along with one adult who was also stranded on my veranda. After a while, two more small heads appeared at the window – two drenched small boys also came in. They were all kids I know well – so I got out the “twister” game and it turned out to be quite a hit, and filled in the hour until the rain was gentle enough that I felt not too mean in throwing them out to make their way home. That evening, about suppertime, the rain hit again, this time with even worse wind. Rain on the zinc roof makes a horrendous noise, and with the wind too, it sounded like the storm was going to come right through the roof. By morning the total in the rain gauge was 11 cm!! Thank goodness this soil seems incapable of being saturated with water – or we would all drown. September is the month of really heavy rains storms – less total rainfall than July or August (when we get about 30 inches a month), but it comes in bigger cloudbursts – so it is the month of landslides. I can believe it after Friday night.
The way the school system functions here is quite something for a westerner. Last Saturday in market, my vegetable lady Esther was still waiting to hear if she had obtained a government teaching job (she trained 3 or 4 years ago, and has been applying ever since for a job). This Saturday, Esther was not in market – another woman had her stall (and less nice vegetables, alas!) – and she tells me that Esther was assigned to a school, far away. You can only imagine how prepared those teachers are to start teaching! The government way of doing things has a major effect on a privately run school like Mbingo 1 as well. Many teachers seem to apply for the government jobs, because of better pay (although reliability of payment is rather questionable). We have 9 teachers here, and this year, 5 of them got government postings – this news came on Tuesday, the day after classes began. I met the headmaster that day, and he was very disturbed, and said his head was just hurting, trying to plan what to do for all the youngsters who were already coming. But today I saw him, and they have other applications, and he thinks they will be able to have a good group of teachers in place shortly. He himself had written the government entrance exam for nursing assistant training (even in government schools, teachers are paid badly compared to nurses), and he passed. But he also had his name in for a government teaching job, and he got that too. The nursing training costs almost $1000 Canadian for the year – an astronomical sum for anyone here – so he has decided to go with the government teaching job. And thankfully, it looks like he will be assigned to Fungeh school, which is just a 20 minute walk from Mbingo, so he will be living here and can advise the teachers at Mbingo 1 school, and, he said, maybe even help with some afternoon classes for the final year (grade 6) students. Sounds about as good a situation as we could have hoped for. But still – what a difference from home, where my teaching friends have been setting up their classrooms and making teaching plans for the past month!
Yesterday my Fulani friends appeared. I had arranged for Salamatu to come to Mbingo 1 school this year, and wondered where she was. It is Ramadan though, so that may be a factor - but she and her small brother Osmanu are going to be starting in class tomorrow. They stayed here while their mother went to market - we played the Memory game, and considering Osmanu knows very little English, they did pretty well. Kids here have no games of the sort we have - so it takes them a while to catch on - but once they do, they LOVE to play, and it is lots of fun to get them going and then watch them. Some of the older kids want help with school work now. There are not enough hours in the day - or energy in the body, alas!
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