I love the ingenuity of the children here!  They have so much fun with so little.

At Jambiani (Zanzibar) last night we watched children having a race along the beach pushing plastic bottles on sticks and making interwoven tracks in the sand.

Yesterday we met some children who obligingly posed with their slalom track for racing bottle caps in the sand.  It looked such fun!

Someone famous said ‘childhood is an invention of the developed world’ (or something similar).  He was right in that children here have responsibilities and know hard physical work from a very young age.  We often see children as young as four years of age minding their younger siblings, maybe taking them to get water with each child carrying a vessel the size depending on the age of the child.  

But the household tasks the children have to do doesn’t mean they don’t have time for fun!  Sometimes it is quite Victorian – children with bike tyres or other ‘hoops’ and a small stick bowling them along.  Sometimes it is far more modern – the children next door to us love to play ‘Emergency sirens and car alarms’.  They can spend up to half an hour running around imitating all the noises they have heard on the videos their dad plays in the little cinema next to our house.  They are very good mimics! 

We often see children pushing home made trundle wheels or little cars they’ve constructed from waste materials and attached to the end of sticks.

One of the joys of my job is seeing the fun the children have with the teaching aids I (and previous volunteers) am teaching their teachers to make.  To a western child it would be very ho-hum to be given a cardboard box clock to use, or a pack of cards made from a calendar page.  But here the children’s faces light up!  “What, you can have fun doing maths?”

Thank you to all of you who have contributed to the costs of printing my book so that more children will be able to have fun in maths.  I can now print plenty!

And a very merry Christmas to you all!

Love from Jenny.