A late post!

It’s been a while since my last post – sorry! There’s either been so much happening and no time to write or nothing happening so no inspiration.

I’ve been back 5 weeks now. For much of that time a school friend (Seymour HS 1972) and her husband have been here staying with me between ascents of Mounts Kilimanjaro and Meru and safari-ing in Ngorongoro, Lake Manyara and Tarangire NPs. It was lovely having visitors – it’s even harder to get people here than to Hamilton! I enjoyed showing them Arusha – it was practice for when my sister and cousin visit in April.

New fan in the library, and a cement floor!

New desk and swivel chair.

Work has continued on renovations at the centre where I work. We have cement floors and ceiling fans in the two classrooms and in the library. The new whiteboards are wonderful now the protective plastic film has been removed – that was a minor hiccup. Facebook friends will know about it from a recent post!

 New white boards bought with DFAT money went into classrooms last Wednesday. They were getting scratched and were hard to write on and hard to clean even with metho. We were sick of them after 3 days!

Cleaning them (unsuccessfully) with warm water and soap yesterday I discovered a small label in the top corner saying “Remove protective film before use”.

Now we have perfect whiteboards!

White board and fan courtesy DFAT

 When you are volunteering you have to celebrate the small victories as much as the big. Monday’s victory was fixing the whiteboard problem, Tuesday’s was having the teacher responsible for IT successfully change the toner bottle in the photocopier.  Not important you might think but there are no photocopier technicians to ring here if something goes wrong!

Self sufficiency enterprise - owls, elephants and scrunchies.

Although I still have 3 months more of my contract I have to start passing over responsibility for all the processes I have in place.  Some will be handed to the teachers and some to the director. Everyone is so busy that pinning them down is hard. The teachers are a bit more biddable – they can be bribed with food.  The Director will be more problematic!

Knitting club

Next week I will run a workshop on using Excel to keep student records. The teachers are looking forward to it! They love the in-service training. Possibly knowing it always comes with muffins, cake and biscuits means they think of training as a positive experience, which is all good.

Australia Day

I’m getting out and about a bit. We had an Australia Day BBQ here at Sunpark with people from 7 nations. Last weekend I went to a card night and played 500 for the first time for many years – lots of fun! There is an Am-Dram production planned for a few months time with auditions starting soon, I’ll help with the production up until I leave. The Aussies here get together quite regularly for breakfasts and lunches at weekends and dinners as well during the week so there is always something happening. I do miss home but I’m never lonely!

A chameleon at breakfast - Bayleaf Hotel

A tractor at Ngaramtoni Forestry Institute - a Ford for Lyn.

Anna has just been in for a chat – she works such long hours at the hospital she can be hard to catch up with! She tells me work has started on the pre-school at Engaruka.  They have enough money for the foundations and floor, and have been able to buy enough bricks to build the walls.  With a few more donations they’ll be able to put a roof on.  I’ll post some photos soon so you can see what progress has been made.

So, that’s my report on the last month’s activities, I’ll try to do better next time and hope to have some pics soon from Engaruka. Thanks for your interest and support, Jenny.