Christmas comes early

Christmas comes early here at BCS. I don't know how much Christmas stuff is going on back home right now but it certainly seems early here. Our dorm kids started decorating their rooms two or three weeks back and Chris and Brianna started playing Christmas CDs in the lounge the weekend before last.

On Friday we took all the junior kids out to Thies to go Christmas shopping; the school has a 'secret santa' type of thing where each person buys a present for another person (student or staff) according to names drawn from a stocking and the kids are given 1000 cfa each towards their gift (~£1). We all piled in a car rapide (local public transport which we'd hired for the morning) and spent an hour or two in Thies' biggest supermarket (a large corner shop by UK standards) and 'New York 1000', a small shop which is a sort of pound shop but not everything is 1000 cfa. After a hard morning's shopping we all went to Les Delices for lunch and the kids were given 2500 each from the treat fund to buy lunch (the BCS treat fund is a fund set up to pay for special treats for the students, in particular weekend activities for those who are full time borders and don't see their parents for months at a time, donations are always welcome, enquire through the school office (see website) for details). The restaurant owners were very kind to us and put cartoon network on the TVs for us (in French of course). I was responsible for two 8 year old boys for the morning, Chan-Hwi, a Korean full border, and Daniel, an English day pupil whose parents live in Popenguine and work in Bible translation.

The journey home was filled with carol singing and trying to remember the words to 'the 12 days of Christmas'.

I need to try and write this month's update today so that I have a chance of getting it out vaguely on time this month.

Hope you're well and it's not too cold where you are.

BCS Olympics

It's been a long but very fun weekend here at BCS. This weekend saw the first ever BCS Olympics, a three day event comprising such varied sports as dodgeball, cycling, hopping, weight lifting, frisbee golf, pillow fighting, skipping, sumo wrestling, crab football and sheet volleyball. It all started on Friday with the opening ceremony. All the teams were assembled between the dining hall and the chapel/school block in their team colours with their flags holding up placards with their country's name. Each of the teams then paraded around the arena to their chosen national anthem, ranging from the theme from Knightrider to the theme from Pirates of The Carribean, and made their opening remarks expressing their thanks for their invitation and their best wishes for the other competitors. Once all the teams had done their thing one we lit the olympic flame. David, one of the boys from my dorm, ran in with a flaming torch (a wooden sword dipped in diesel) which was then passed from team to team before being used to light a small bonfire in a steel barrel (all this accompanied by suitably cheesy music of course). Each team competed galantly throughout the weekend with some very impressive individual efforts, particularly in the weightlifting. I spent most of the weekend behind the screen of my digital camera, having found a tripod in a cupboard a few days earlier. I will try and put the best photos on a CD and send them home so they can be put up on my Flickr page.

Today's my day off again, I'll probably have a lazy day on site I think although I'd like to go to the beach (the girls left without me last week, they couldn't find me :o( the phone wasn't working properly in the workshop where I was tinkering).

School Cook for a day

Well, it's my day off again and I'm back in my classroom, but only to change the songs on my mp3 player and put last week's blog entry on my memory stick. This afternoon I'm going down to Sindia to pick up my new clothes I mentioned last time. I'd like to cycle down to the beach later for a swim but I'll have to see what the others want to do because it's no fun on my own. My plans for the rest of the day include making some hooks for the ICT store room and a small lantern. I've taken to using our new school treehouse in the evenings after I put the kids to bed as a place to relax so I'd like to make a little lantern so I can take my book up there with me.

This weekend was a little more relaxed than the last. I spent Saturday morning hanging out in the dorm and then after a long siesta I played cricket in the sports hall. In the evening we played a game called Catacombs (sp?) where a small group of people are selected to be roman soldiers and the rest of us are 1st century Christians and the Christians have to make their way to a secret meeting place somewhere on the compound without the soldiers finding out where they're meeting. It was great fun, we turned off all the security lights so the only light we had was from the stars and everyone scattered across the compound trying to throw the soldiers of the scent before converging on a very small space in some remote corner of the school site.
On Sunday I was cooking lunch for the whole school which was a challenge. I made paprika chicken with the help of Franziska but it was a little harder than at home. Firstly we were cooking for over 50 people. Secondly I would normally use tinned mushroom soup as a sauce but you can't get it here so we made a strange mix between bechamel sauce and mushroom gloop. Time consuming and not quite right but edible at least. after cleaning and washing up I was a little late starting my siesta so I had an extended one again until 4 when I went to the sports hall to play basketball. In the evening the German contingent celebrated St. Martin's day and I joined them in marching around with paper lanterns singing "Ich gehe mit meine laterne und meine laterne mit mir", "St. Martin, St. Martin, St. Martin war ein gute mann" and "Laterne, laterne, sonne, mun und scherne" (I only caught the first lines of the songs, forgive any spelling mistakes too as I never saw them written). After putting the Eagle kids to bed I went to Falcon (the oldest dorm) to fix a computer and ended up staying there and having hot chocolate which was great.

Bonfire Night

It's Tuesday and I'm in the middle of 'teaching' the IGCSE class; I use inverted commas as the year 11s are all happily plodding along with their projects and the one year 10, Christoph, is embarking on a new active learning assignment I gave him this morning to try and liven up our somewhat dull one to one teaching sessions that are now necessary (the year 11s having finished the taught syllabus).

I'm currently enjoying my teaching a bit more as I've been able to plan ahead more this term and some of the units we're studying are quite interesting. I'm also finding it a great blessing to be able to reuse material I did with the year 9s at the start of term with the year 8s as they are now studying the same unit.
This weekend was busy. We had a bike repair day on Saturday in which I was involved which meant being up at the workshop most of the day try to ressurect dying bicycles which probably would have been scrapped by now in the UK. On Sunday I was able to play bass in our chruch meeting for the first time since I arrived. I enjoyed it very much, despite having to share an amplifier with a guitar and microphone and playing on a neck that needed a fair bit of adjustment.

Sunday was bonfire night, but of course you're well aware of that. I, on the other hand, was taken a little by surprise as it's hot and sunny here and not at all like November should be. The Brits got together and we built an impressive bonfire and we'd sent some of the teachers on a mission to find fireworks on their day off in Dakar on Saturday. They had got some pretty impressive rockets from the Korean shop on Pompidou (the main shopping street). Unfortunately they didn't find any brown sugar so we couldn't make bonfire toffee but we made flapjack instead to my old housemate Jonathan's trusty recipe which is now lodged in my brain.

On Monday I got up extra early and cycled to Popenguine with Franziska and Jacqui to see the sunrise and eat breakfast at a cafe on the beach. It was lovely. The tide was quite high and the waves were very big which was great fun for paddling. Unfortunately we had some problems with the bikes on the way home and had to be picked up by Sue, the school secretary (the cost of which will go 'through the books' as everything does here, it's almost like a cashless society here at BCS). We also made a trip down to Sindia (the village at the crossroads of the main road to Dakar, 2km away) to see the tailor. I'm now having some trousers and a shirt made which I'll be able to pick up next Monday afternoon. It will be good to get a few more clothes as you go through them much quicker in this climate.

It's now siesta time, I had to stop writing for lunch and came back at the words "On Monday". I'm now going to go and enjoy what little free time I get during the day (particularly Tuesdays) by a short snooze and perhaps a spot of reading. Goodbye.