Getting back to normal

We had a fun time first thing this morning harvesting our green grams, (mung beans). All the lower school pupils trooped down to the bottom of our farm to gather up the crop. Green grams look like miniature pea pods. Each pod contains small green seeds which are cooked and served with rice. We have to harvest en masse occasionally so that a crop doesn’t spoil and go over. The green gram harvest takes a few sessions. We are really at the tail end of the harvest now and trying to avoid the remainder of the crop ‘bursting’ and going to waste. Being out on the farm first thing is a nice way to start the day and I think our young harvesters had a good time.

The borehole guy arrived this afternoon and the borehole is now fixed. As suspected there wasn’t much wrong with it. In fairly typical fashion he seemed to pretty much look at it and it worked. There is a possible fault with the electricity supply from the generator and a chance that the sensors at the business end of the pump indicated a shortage of water in the borehole. Either way we now have full tanks everywhere and the equipment has been serviced so overall a good result.

The district mocks finished today. All went smoothly and we should get an initial idea of how well our pupils performed tomorrow. The official results will take some time to process. First indications are that there has been an improvement in overall performance with one or two individual surprises. I wait with bated breath – it would be nice to see some of the pupils who are usually in the middle ranks have the encouragement of doing better than they expected. As a bit of a reward for studying hard we let the children who live here watch a film tonight. We have a very eclectic collection of videos and DVDs. The children haven’t watched The Sound of Music for a while and clearly relished the idea of the hills being alive with it today.

The whole KCPE process is a very long, drawn out affair lasting the whole of the year. The pupils will be put out of their misery in November when they finally sit the exam. Madam Nyangwe, (the head teacher), Mr Isaiah, (Agriculture College lecturer) and I had our first meeting today to discuss ways of making sure our Standard 8 pupils are well prepared for the KCPE exams at the end of the year. One of the questions we considered was “what are all the other schools in our zone doing?” The answer would probably send pupils in Europe into shock. In a typical primary school in Kenya the Standard 8 pupils will start their studies at 6.00 a.m. and finish at about 8 in the evening. They would be expected to attend school on Saturday and Sunday afternoon and to attend ‘tuition’ for two weeks, (daytime), in the school holidays. They will typically follow this pattern for most of the school year, starting in January. We are considering our options!