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.