Why did no-one tell me the sun was strong here?

A very varied week, but I shouldn't be surprised about that now. Two glorious days at the beach, on Sunday and Friday. As I have come to expect, it was warm, clean, empty and beautiful. You order food, some charmingly artisanal natives leap enthusiastically into their charmingly artisanal, timelessly classic boat, catch fish for you and cook chips to go with it (or they’ve already bought it from the stinky, fly-crawling market, possibly). Before this, I did some energetic gazing at the horizon with a very cold beer, and some idle paddling in warm water collecting shells. But why did no-one tell me that I be careful about the sun in tropical Africa, at the hottest time of the year? My outrageous sunburn must be someone else’s fault and not mine. I was in the sun for literally three lots of five minutes in the sea, both trips and the rest of the time in total shade. And now I look like a giant version of those pink shrimp sweets you used to get, but wearing a cream swimming costume. The tragic thing is not learning my lesson the first time, so now I am simultaneously peeling from the first burn and hot and sore from the second one. What a spanner.

The photos show the beautiful beach, the results of carelessly applied sun cream on one leg (resulting in piebald sunburn), and my burned back. I took the last one in the bathroom mirror, hence strange pose with camera.

I have had some lovely emails about the Christmas decorations, to my great relief. I was very worried that they would be just the wrong side of charmingly amateurish, and I feel very protective of the deafs, even though they are really annoying and do everything – everything! wrong the first time. Honestly, I would never set up a fair-trade importing-gorgeous-little-things business here. I’m just not patient enough to cope with the agony of explaining everything five times, having to check up every single day and seeing the production line stop because of any little problem. So thank you so much to everyone who said they liked them. I have passed on your thanks to the deafs, and they were really excited. I have also given them some money. They curtsied when I handed it over, which was mortifying. And shamefully marvellous too! I love being worshipped.

Here is the production line, looking disturbingly cheerful. You’d think that the presence of the gang-master would be more frightening than it clearly is. And the other photo is of the sewing teacher assistant, who is in charge of the decorations. She is deaf and used to be homeless and very ill until Matilda took her on. She’d just been given a Certificate of Excellence (designed by me, of course, in a desperate attempt to raise teacher morale) for raising so much money for the school, and was actually delighted rather than irritated at just getting a poncey certificate rather than more money.

Other highlights of this week have been:

· One of the teachers’ children runs away from me still (or creeps up on me when I am not looking, like Grandmother’s Footsteps). I was chatting to her mother about it, and she said, in the manner of one who thinks she is saying something completely normal “Oh yes, she is scared of you because she thinks you are an albino! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!" Tsk. Then I found out that in some areas of Tanzania, people still think albinos are witches and there has to be a public information campaign to stop them being murdered.

· My lovely taxi driver invited me to dinner with him and his wife and extended family. It was most emphatically NOT in a tourist area. I was very touched that he asked me, although it was a bit of a strain keeping Swahili going for a whole meal, especially coping with comedy questions like “Do white people breastfeed their children?”. Here he is, plus one of his v cute nieces, and me with a proper baby. It is one of twins, and Ahmad said in a very matter of fact way that the other one was cleverer and this one only had a small brain. Note the woolly hat, even though it's well over 30 degrees at the moment.

Incidentally, a special message for Mum, Coreen and "Mr David" - Ahmad is very happy that you all remember him and he hopes you are well.

· Improving my 5k time and actually feeling sweat run into my eyes

· Choir rehearsals for the Christmas concert, singing Winter Wonderland and Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire etc in air-conditioned room and then going out into a humid tropical night

· Getting a bookshelf made, by the deafs, so that my room can be nice and tidy and Just So, and I can have a fruit bowl and vase of lovely frangipani. And on a smaller scale, getting a doorstop made so that the door doesn’t crash shut when the breeze gets up.

· Two Red Cross care packages! One from my favourite sister, in Australia, with gorgeous chocolate and face cream and a book and an embroidered tablecloth, and one from my lovely friend Sarah, which took SIX WEEKS to get here and had lovely stolen stationery and paid-for hair-bands.

· Agreeing with my friend Rosie, who is coming to visit, that we’ll splash out on a little safari and go on the one where you do elephant tracking by foot. It is difficult to imagine two people less likely to be able to competently track elephants. Rosie insists that she has no clothes suitable for a tropical summer at all and wants to bring jeans (!) and I will definitely laugh too loudly at my own jokes and then trip over and get trampled by a raging bull elephant. We are going purely to lay in a store of comedy memories for when we’re in Shady Pines Rest Home together.

· Finding out that I had won the handmade patchwork quilt I had insanely bid for at the Diplomatic Spouses’ Bazaar. Insane because a) I am a volunteer and have no money b) I may have mentioned that it is very hot here c) it will cost me a fortune to get it home.

· Discussing whether to slaughter two of the school’s cows or not

· The nuns making doughnuts for me to take to the choir pot-luck lunch. You can see Sister Teddy here crouched over charcoal in the outside kitchen.

It’s also been quite a hard week. Although I don’t work as long hours as I used to in England, it’s just so drainingly hot that even eight hours wipes me out. And this week I had to tell the head that shouting at the staff every day because a few of them are bunking off school is just not working, unsurprisingly, and that he has to do proper rounds of the school and write down who is missing. I also realised that I am becoming just as tired as I was in London, and the whole point of coming away was to stop rushing about as well as to do something useful. So I’ve made a big decision: from next term, I am only going to work four full days a week and I am going to stop teaching my English class to the pupils. This means I can do things like go to the beach, choir, running, yoga and French and Swahili lessons without being shattered the whole time. I am not sure how much good I was doing with the pupils anyway: they understand it in the lesson but most of them then literally forget overnight and have no tradition of learning by heart or doing homework. I did a third, THIRD revision lesson on the past tense this week, then signed a really simple sentence: “Yesterday I bought an egg” and asked them to write it in English. They had a list of verbs with past participles IN FRONT OF THEM, but only one of them could do it and the rest wrote things like “I buying egg” and “You are football” or just looked mildly perplexed. I am obviously doing something wrong, and I am beginning to find it hard to stay patient, so I think I might have to admit that it’s too much.

But soothing me is mango season. They are about 4p each and absolutely delicious. My scab is healing up nicely, my sunburn won’t last forever, and I am going to Rwanda in two and a half weeks to track gorillas. I hasten to add that this is not on my own with a big gun and a pith helmet but as part of an extremely costly conservation-friendly guided tour with lovely, brave Sharon and Fred. And the collapsed soakpit finally, finally has a concrete lid, after six weeks of nagging. So no more stinky thousands of gallons of filth.

Next week’s main event is presenting to the Rotary Club, where I have been billed as young, beautiful, intelligent and tall. Luckily I am all these things in abundance, so all that remains is to write my presentation…