Friday and Saturday: November 16 and 17. The child-catcher returns.

Yesterday was almost a normal day at school, except I was a bit late. Normally I get there at 7.30am, in time to look stern during assembly and tell my favourite pupils to tuck their shirts in properly, but I was very sore after my tumble, so I slept longer.



I went to whip the decorations production line into shape and was actually quite impressed with how many more stars they’d made since the last gang-master visit. Then I went to check on the benches that the deaf carpenters are making – I love them: they are really cheery and pleased to see me all the time. And they are making me a hand-made bookcase for 80,000 TSh – about £32. My dedication to the school has wavered slightly in that I’ve ordered work on the benches to cease so that I can have my bookcase quickly. I’ve decided it’s much more important that my cell in the convent is tidy than it is that the children can sit down I comfort to eat their lunch.



After that, I:

• faffed around with the running costs budget for a while, but there’s no escaping the fact that a) there’s no money for any of it and b) I am utterly unconvinced that we’ve identified all the costs. It can’t be this easy to list everything a school needs.



• wrote the agenda for next Monday’s catch-up meeting



• prepared for a meeting with Sir Chande that afternoon (local VIP who founded the school)



• chased, increasingly despairingly, the engineers who broke the soakpit six weeks and haven’t mended it yet. The photo shows the current state. Excellent safety fence! Really effective. All that evil-looking black liquid in it is foul-water: it really stinks.
  
  
  



• rang the Social Commissioner’s office to say that I wanted them to declare the soakpit a health hazard if it wasn’t fixed by next week. That means I can report the engineers to some Board of Engineers in Tanzania (like they’ll care) and threaten to close the school



• Went through a quote for mending everything in the school, including the big holes in the ceiling, which I fear are spider escape-routes
  
• Taught (I hope) possessive pronouns to my English class. I’ll see if anything has sunk in on Monday.
  
  I prepared a load of emails to send later and then it was time for the school driver to take me to Sir Chande. We rumbled off in the pick-up truck. I was really drooping by then, and unpleasantly hot, but the meeting was great. Sir C rang up the soakpit engineer’s boss and ranted at him with a curious mixture of menace and old-fashioned English: “I want you to strangle that fellow”. We now have a promise that it will be fixed by Tuesday, but even though I am a more than usually gullible person, I am beginning to notice a pattern here. We’ll see. I even persuaded him to admit that it was wrong that poor Matilda had only been paid a third of her salary for a year, because there’s no money. Hurray.
  
  Lovely Dominic drove me home and I limped upstairs for a shower that I really needed and which probably answered a few other people’s prayers as well. I can’t believe how hot it is again now it’s not raining.

Today (Saturday) I had a three hour choir rehearsal and then went to the second-hand clothes shop. I bought three shirts and a skirt for £10, which was appallingly bad bargaining, but I really needed to end the transaction: it was soooo hot and there’s no mirror and nowhere to change and eight men bringing you utterly appalling clothes and not really understanding why you don’t want a bright orange dress that you could fit you plus a friend in. I also bought some Tinga Tinga nameplates as presents, some beaded flip-flops for £3, and five lovely kikois for some underpaid lackey to turn into gifts, and read my book looking at the sea in this café:

Then I went to the Diplomatic Spouses’ Bazaar, which was surprisingly good. I bought some mince pies for the nuns from lovely Kasia at the British stall, some Christmas decorations from the Scandinavian stalls, and put in a bid for a lovely home-made quilt in the auction at the Canadian one. Like I need another quilt! Am waiting to hear if I’ve won: I really want it but a) I have no salary and b) how in the name of arse will I get it home?

I made another child (niece of one of the nuns) cry tonight: not just a bit of weeping but full blown shrieking and sobbing. You can see here:

I was going to do a little video, as the screaming was so comically loud, but I thought it would be a bit mean.

So that was my week – like I said, normally I do more work at the school but they do this mystifying thing of shutting it when one year has exams. Personally, I think they are just a little too eager to have a day off. Next week I am going to my taxi driver’s house to have dinner with him and his wife and his daughter! I am very flattered that he thinks I am nice, but as my Swahili is barely enough to fill our taxi journeys, I am a little worried about how I am going to talk for the length of an African meal….