A Long Monday

Mondays used to go so quickly when it was my day off. Today's been
unusually long though. I've been on lock-up and generator duty today
which means I had to unlock the main school buildings at six o'clock
this morning and I have to lock up again at about 10:30 tonight.

Having got up so early I went to the 6:15 prayer meeting and then came
home again to finish the getting up process and brew a pot of tea before
breakfast in the dining hall.

I used my grapefruit marmalade. It tastes fantastic but unfortunately
didn't even remotely set and therefore eating it is a balancing act
trying to stop it running of the bread. There are 30 jars of it so I
think I might need to buy some pectin or gelatine and try to rectify the
problem or else find another use for it (an interesting dessert for
Sunday lunch maybe!?)

School was good this morning. My problem class, year 8, has been going
much better for the last two lessons.

Afternoons are a bit funny at the moment. My day's very disjointed as my
teaching's usually over by lunch and then siesta onwards is spent at
home trying to plan and prepare lessons. The afternoons can be very long
and not always productive and there's no clear finishing time at the end
of school when you're at home.

The good news is that by staying in tonight I've bought myself time for
the rest of the week. I have only two more lessons to prepare for the
coming week (both on Friday) and so I can hopefully much make bigger
inroads into next week's planning before the weekend. I should also be
able to start devoting more time to the maintenance side of my
responsibilities in the afternoons.

I spent a good half hour this evening just listening to music. I made
the mistake of choosing one of my favourite most relaxing and absorbing
tracks for the start of my evening's playlist and then spent the next 30
minutes just sitting in the soft glow of my lamp letting my favourite
tracks wash over me and enjoying some satisfying resonance somewhere
inside my gut from my little subwoofer.

Whilst enjoying the music I was dwelling on the pleasure which such
things can bring and the levels on which it satisfies. I had the joyous
revelation that even though I don't expect to see most of my favourite
bands and musicians in heaven I can look forward to a sound which
satisfies on an even deeper level, combining all that is so powerful
throughout the history of human music making and redeeming and
perfecting it in the presence of the perfect and glorious God who even
now I'm lost for words to describe as I'd like to.

Now the work is done for the night and I'm onto hot chocolate and Neil
Young. Probably a bit of a strum on the guitar too before I go lock up
and give the keys to Adam who will be on duty for the rest of the week.

Grapefruit Marmalade

The first full school week is over and it's finally my day off again.

It's been a very busy week this week. I've ended up working every
evening to keep up with lesson prep and I have a lot to do tomorrow
before next week starts.

My target at the moment is to get into a routine where all of the coming
week's lessons are prepared before the Monday morning and I can use the
bulk of my prep time during the week to prepare for the following week.
If I can achieve this I think it will lighten my load at the end of the
week, Friday night and Sunday afternoon. I still have to work out how
the maintenance side of things fits together though; theoretically I
should be using a fair amount of my afternoon time to work on
maintenance of electronic equipment, computers and the telephone system.

I had my old quiet time group round for tea last night, Tristan, Katie,
Immanuella and Deborah. We had lots of fun and ate Penguin bars an
played 'cheat'. It was lovely to have them here and they didn't want to
leave at the end and implored me to have them round again soon. I
definitely will but I need to be careful to invite other kids at other
times so as not to develop any sense of 'Uncle Andrew's favourites'.

Today I'm making grapefruit marmalade. It's something I planned to do
since the end of last year. We had grapefruit jam here at school at the
start of last year and I ate it every morning at breakfast but not
everyone liked it and when it ran out they didn't seem especially keen
to make any more any time soon as it had taken so long to finish that
last batch.

I know there were several people who were quite keen on the jam and I
thought that maybe if I made some myself I could use it as birthday
presents for quite a large number of people and also enjoy it myself.

I've never made marmalade from scratch before so I'm a little anxious to
see how it turns out. I'm working from quantities scribbled from my
mum's recipe book at home but I've not got any instructions. I made some
orange marmalade in the summer but that was from 'Mamade' where you are
given the fruit, already reduced down, and you just add water and sugar
and boil it up together.

One worry is that the sugar we get here in Senegal behaves very
different to that which I'm used to at home. Probably because it's from
cane and not beet and I'm not sure how refined it is. The main
difference I've noticed is that it's sweeter and it doesn't melt so
easily. Not a great combination for marmalade making.

It took me an hour and a half to cut the three kilos of grapefruit this
morning and my knife hand is still feeling a little numb nearly three
hours later. I realised later that I could have saved myself a lot of
time and discomfort when I spied the grater in the cupboard and thought
back to the never ending task of cutting the peel into fine strips. A
lesson learned for next time at least.

I bought twice as many grapefruit as I needed by mistake (I had the
wrong number in my head and didn't bother to check it) so I'm doubling
the quantities and shall probably end up with over twenty jars of
marmalade! I do hope it's edible :os

Must go stir it again!

First Day Off

It's been a busy first week and I'd intended to write much earlier than
this but at least now it's my first day off and I have a little time (or
at least I've taken a little time).

My first week teaching science has gone well. I've found that all my
lesson plans were a little too long so far. I probably forgot how long
it takes to do some things over the summer. Science lessons are very
different to teach from ICT ones too. Everyone tells me that's the
better way round for things to be though. I'm not worried about falling
behind schedule yet as the lessons planned would have finished the first
units ahead of schedule anyway.

I still have a lot of prep to do for next week but I think I'll be fine.
I'm trying to keep my Saturday day off as a work free day of rest as
Sundays here often involve duties which can take up a large part of the day.

The kids are settling in well and the new staff seem to be doing equally
well. I just went for a walk around the compound and dropped by the
dorms; Saturday was proceeding as normal, few kids in the dorm lounges,
some complaining of boredom but generally everyone's doing what they
normally would have done last year and is happy doing it.

It is a bit strange not being in the dorm. I do miss being there with
the kids and just enjoying their company and conversation. I could
easily go and hang out there but I think this is a very important time
for the kids' development of relationships with the new staff and to be
honest I've not really had much time to go and sit in a dorm lounge anyway.

Tomorrow's our first church service of the school year and I'm involved
in leading. Not too much pressure as I'm mainly playing bass but I might
be telling a short parable too if I can find something suitable.

It's rained a lot this week.

5:1 Senegal

I've just woken up from a little Sunday afternoon snooze on the couch to
find rain outside yet again. It seems to be raining more frequently now,
we had a really noisy storm yesterday morning with thunderclaps right
overhead.

Hopefully it'll clear up in 20 minutes or so as we are all s'posed to be
going to the beach this afternoon.

We were going to go yesterday but some other plans started to be made
for alternative uses of a Saturday afternoon. One of these plans
involved a trip to Dakar to watch Senegal play Burkina Faso in a
qualification match for the 'African Nations Cup', to be held early next
year.

A group of nine of us went in with the school minibus, picking up four
more at the WEC guesthouse in Dakar.

Tickets for Senegalese international football seem to be fairly easy to
get hold of in comparison to international football back home. We paid
£2 each for ours and sat on concrete steps with numbers to mark each
alloted space but we could have paid just £1 and stood in the terraces.
There aren't many proper seats but if we'd wanted them it would have
only set us back £10 a piece.

Getting into the ground was somewhat more difficult. Whilst we were
allocated gate numbers on our tickets we were still made to queue
outside the stadium walls regardless of where we were sat. After walking
around the stadium and hopping from queue to queue in the hope of
getting in quicker we finally settled on a fairly short looking queue by
the entrance for the terraces where we were assured we could enter with
our £2 tickets.

Eventually we got through the stadium walls and also through our proper
gate to our seating area where we settled down, just in time to see the
teams walking out onto the pitch.

We were sat next to a very large and noisy drum group and a guy with
dual air horns charged by a large metal lever which he was pumping away
on, also very noisy. The atmosphere was great but I was surprised not to
have ringing in my ears that night because it was so loud (for some
reason I chose to leave my earplugs in England for my second year here).

The pre-match crowd antics were fairly standard for a European game, a
mexican wave a few times round the stadium and the familiar chant of
'ole ole ole ole'.

We had a fairly decent view, looking out across a corner of the pitch.
For the first half Senegal were shooting towards us and it seemed like
the crowd's cheering always went up a notch when the ball came to
El-Hadj Diouf in the final third of the field.

Senegal were definitely in control for the first twenty minutes which
culminated in the first goal after about 15 minutes. For the rest of the
second half they seemed to lose the plot a little and Burkina got an
equaliser looking likely to score again if it weren't for the half time
whistle (which we had no chance of hearing thanks to the drum group
beside us).

After the half time break things were back as they should be, Senegal
dominant, scoring again after ten or fifteen minutes and continuing to
attack throughout the rest of the game giving us the final score of
Senegal five, Burina Faso one.

After the game we made our way through the jubilant crowds back to the
minibus and headed back the the guesthouse and then LGM for food and ice
cream.

We finally arrived back at school at around 11:30pm.