More on Health and Safety: intelligent risk management

I was planning to stomp off to the head teacher’s office in a big strop recently about various health and safety hazards in the school. Mainly, these are Very Sharp Things near unsupervised children. No-one has any pencil sharpeners here except the rich Mzungu, who bulk buys them because she cannot bear the alternative … using a razor blade. To be fair, the younger children aren’t allowed to sharpen their own pencils but the blades lie around everywhere. Anyway, I have been tsking about this to myself and the tsks developed into raised eyebrows and pursed lips when I saw this horror in a classroom last week!

All the classrooms have these mirrors, largely unused, to try to help the children with mouth shapes when talking. They are like very wide dressing table mirrors. This one is just sitting in shards on the classroom floor. You can see how much dust there is – it’s not as if it’s only just happened! And the children are in their classrooms on their own a lot: it is quite normal here for teachers to disappear for a whole lesson at a time. (Note – this is very definitely on my List of Things to Discuss with the Headteacher). So I looked in horror and took a sneaky photo to show you all, covering up by taking lots of other boring snaps. And I asked the teacher if she wasn’t scared that the children would cut themselves? Response: African shrug, incomprehensibly fast Kiswahili, happy smile.

I was just getting worked up and planning what to say to the head when I realised: I have not actually seen a single child with any kind of injury. I had forgotten that children do understand that sharp things cut them and hot things burn them.

And I had turned into a loathsome H&S busybody. What next for me that I previously hated? Help. Will I start to begin sentences with “To be honest…”? or express a hope that “yourself will leave a comment on this post”? Develop a wheat intolerance? Go on a detox? Wear a body warmer? Buy a crate of Pinot Grigio?

This afternoon I walked through the village and saw a group of children playing at cooking. But not with a lovely handcrafted painted toy oven and child-sized pretendy saucepan. They had white-hot charcoal, an iron pot and were shallow-frying some chips in cooking oil. The oldest was maybe seven. She was lying on the ground blowing the coals. They all seemed to be fine and having a laugh. Hmm.