Thursday 18th October

What a week of rollercoaster emotions! I haven’t been able to control the tears at all! On Monday as the electricity is STILL out I couldn’t teach computers again and the S3’s didn’t want my help with their revising so I headed up to our staff room to chill until someone would speak to me. Thankfully I didn’t even get to the staff room as I went and spoke to Emma who asked me to teach his Primary 2 class! It was so much fun! I was teaching them all about their rights as a child and made hand actions for every right, I swear Project have it so wrong making me teach secondary!

After my Primary 2 class I went back to the staff room where I found Justine. She was in a bad mood because she was tired but smiled and told me she was fine, then shouted at Dan who came and cuddled into me before falling asleep. It seems to be a common thing for Dan to fall asleep on me these days! The rest of the day went as planned, me teaching, the kids looking bored, me being bored, the kids getting confused, me getting confused, it is very hard being a teacher without any qualification y’know. I mean at least real teachers have 4 years of Uni to teach them how to control a class and what to teach them and even how to make it interesting! I haven’t got a Scooby what to do, in fact I sometimes don’t even know if what I am teaching them is right!

Anyhoo, after the teaching day was over I headed home to get ready for my trip up to some secondary school; by get ready I mean I tied my hair up again and sat chatting to Holly! Then James turned up with what looked like a pretty old looking boda boda to take us up to the school. I can assure you even if the boda had been brand new I would not have enjoyed that ride! The roads were all bumpy and broken from the rain and because they are just dust roads, and the hills were flipping huge, in fact we had to go over a tiny, and I mean TINY, bit of mud that was surrounded by two big drops as the men were digging the road up! Eventually we arrived at the school after a 45 minute death ride where we were given coke and biscuits and spent the majority of the time taking the mick out of James, the bloke I was telling you all about before! Monday night was actually really good fun and I had a good laugh. It was even continued when I got home and Greg called, however our calls lasted about 10 minutes in total because his new phone eats up his credit, sad times!

Tuesday was a bit of a dull day. The only exciting thing that really happened was we made chippati’s ourselves. They weren’t that great, but with some practice I reckon we will have perfected them! In fact yesterday we nearly did, but I will get to that! Yesterday was quite a nice day! We had two goats in the garden all day to try and trim the grass a bit, which was only a little successful! We also had an average day at school however I had double free between break and lunch where I spent the first hour playing with Elinah and Dan while talking to Justine and then second hour having a shower (pouring cold water from a bottle over myself, great shower!). It was really quite a pleasant afternoon! Then at lunch time Justine gave us our Ugandan names! My name is Ssanyu, which means happiness and joy, and Holly is called Namirembe, which means peace! How cool is that? We have Uganda names now, we are practically locals! Wednesday night we also came close to perfecting the chippati’s before heading out for some milk, I am really missing milk! So with our milk, which we changed into hot chocolate, we settled for the evening to watch Shrek 2! However as it neared 8pm we realised our night was drawing close to an end and we needed our beauty sleep so have the rest of the film for tonight!

Today has been a strange day. It is the only way I can explain it I swear! I didn’t have the greatest sleep last night which probably didn’t help, but I also had a horrible HORRIBLE nightmare! It was so bad that I woke up crying in hysterics! I was petrified and I am now waiting patiently for my big brother to call me to assure me everything is alright! I can’t actually describe the dream without crying again so I am afraid you will just have to take my word for it! So after Holly had managed to calm me down I decided I would go out and clean the dishes and make us porridge, even if it was half 6, a tad early I would say. Once I had made the porridge and some tea I went back in where we sat on Holly’s bed eating our breakfast and chatting, and then the greatest thing happened…Justine brought us more milk, that’s right ladies and gents, I had a milky cup of tea! I swear milk is like gold to me right now, and chocolate is like diamonds! So there we were drinking our milk and chatting, it was great! We haven’t been doing it as much as we used to so I am glad we did it today!

However slight issue arose when I realised it was quarter to 8, I was still in my jammies and school started in 15 minutes. I quickly rushed about brushing my hair with my toothbrush and brushing my teeth with my hairbrush, I swear I need to get more organised! Running out the door while still trying to get my foot in my shoe I managed to get to class only 5 minutes late today. It was cool though, no one was to know, even me because I forgot my watch! Disaster! It meant I had no clue how long my lesson was going to last or how quickly the kids were doing the exercises, only a slight problem I suppose, but a bit of a pain too. So I had a really exciting lesson of teaching the kids how to write informal letters and then getting them to do the exercise of writing 3 different types. I am enjoying doing English quite a bit I have decided, because you can just set them a task and get them to keep practicing it, fantastic! It also meant I could plan my S2 lesson for this afternoon because I knew I wouldn’t do it in my free (which is supposed to be computing but there is still no electricity, I am slowly fading away with boredom! Even my kindle is dying!)

So now I am chilling in Greg’s big baggy top because I am boiling, Africa isn’t so cool, and tired, but I shall soon head to school for lunch and then teach my delightful Senior 2’s how the difference between direct and indirect speech. By the way, what is the difference?