The whole of the moon

For the music fans amongst you follow the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsNTmjlf1vI&feature=related

Waxing philosophical tonight I had a ‘whole of the moon’ moment this evening. For those of you who don’t know the song the hook line is “I saw the crescent, You saw the whole of the moon”. It’s a poignant song and like most clever ones the chorus kind of stays with you.

I’ve had another good day today. It really has been a revelation being able to focus on a small number of tasks during this visit rather than rushing round like I usually do. I’ve been getting my maths together today as part of a curriculum review in our school. Not having taught maths for many years and having had no need to do much beyond the basics for quite a while my maths is a bit rusty. It’s encouraging to know that the relevant theory and concepts are still accessible in one of the dustier corners of my brain and satisfying getting the test paper answers right. (I must beware of getting too carried away here – it’s still fairly straightforward maths). I had a fun time after our praise and worship session this evening doing some maths revision with the children.

Back to the whole of the moon. As I have blogged previously I am a bit of a creature of habit and have a few rituals that I like to stick to when I’m over here. One of them is using the same shower cubicle at night. It has been a hot day today so I was really looking forward to my late evening soak. It’s usually a good idea to check that there is actually water in the showers before getting undressed. Water check completed I stepped under the shower – and the water stopped almost immediately. Annoyed I considered heading back indoors. The stars persuaded me to try the cubicles on the other side of the path. Tonight there are no clouds in the sky and the stars are amazing. Its lovely looking up at the stars while you are scrubbing off the dirt and sweat of the day – quite awe inspiring. Fortunately the water level was fine and I was able to enjoy my shower. I had though that the view of the stars from my usual spot was pretty spectacular but the view from a different viewpoint was out of this world. The rows of shower cubicles are arranged at right angles to each other and looking down the sky line rather than across it, (as I usually do), made the stars stretch on for miles. In the ten years that we have been in Kosele I have never before stood still and enjoyed that particular scene.

It made me think. Standing still and adopting a different perspective opened up a completely different view to me – a much ‘bigger sky’ than I had imagined before. Our work here in Kosele is still full of challenges. “African Time” still drives me nuts. Having to slow down my thinking so I communicate better is occasionally frustrating. There is always something new to learn. It is, of course, blindingly obvious that adopting a new take on familiar problems is generally a wise thing to do. Sometimes you have to be prodded fairly vigorously to take the obvious step. I’m grateful that tonight’s reminder was such a beautiful object lesson.

Education reform

It has, as ever, been an interesting day today. I’ve spent most of the time working on our education programme and school development. In common with schools all over the world we are busy comparing test scores with other schools and focusing on ways of making sure that our Standard 8 pupils get the best shot at the public exam at the end of the year. It’s a very challenging project because there are so many things to take into consideration. It is also very rewarding. I’ve been able to work very closely with Madam Nyangwe our head teacher and Mr Isaiah from the Agriculture College and we are definitely growing together as a team.

One of the safest principles to adopt is “sticking with the knitting” – in our case making sure that the children get taught appropriately, using materials suitable for their age and ability. It’s not really rocket science by any stretch of the imagination. We are about to undertake a curriculum review so I thought I’d get a bit of head start by looking at the Standard 1 revision to get a better idea of what is expected from them. This led to an interesting diversion when I discovered that Microsoft Word is able to work out the readability of text that you type into it. (To turn it on click on the spelling and grammar tool, then options and select show readability statistics).  Tonight’s post has a Flesch reading ease rating of 53.3% and a Flesch-Kincaid level of 10.8. This makes it fairly difficult to read and, (optimistically), readable by 50% of adults. I don’t plan to dumb it down any time soon.

This discovery was prompted by the contents of the Standard 1 revision encyclopaedia, in particular the exercises in the Social Studies section. Most of our Standard 1 pupils come from very poor backgrounds. They have just finished in what would be a reception class in England. They are very young. You might like to try these activities with children that you know who are in Year 1.  Questions on the topic of Our School include:

7. Pupils at school go to assembly on _______ and ___________.

8. Name the various people found in your school.

11. What is the work of a prefect in a class? ______________________

13. Why do we have rules at school? _____________________

21. What is the work of a clerk? __________________________

And my favourite

24. _________ is where teacher meet to talk more about school.

It’s always good to have high expectations for pupils !

It’s also good to know that the scourge of cheating in public exams is being dealt with severely. Cheating is notoriously rampant in schools in Kenya. After the public exams in November the newspapers are full of stories about schools and pupils who have managed to find some way of gaining an edge in the exams, (usually by buying a copy of the paper and mark scheme before the pupils sit the exam). On the back page of today’s Daily Nation there was a short report on the government’s latest proposals for anybody caught cheating in public exams. These measures will be discussed and, according to the Nation, ideally come into law in time for this November’s exams. Anyone caught cheating will face a 10 year jail term or a 10 million shilling fine. Now that’s what I call direct action.

Dancing the night away

Today has been very rewarding. I have managed to make good progress on both of my ‘big projects’ for this visit and was able to spend some time on the farm with Duncan, (our farm manager), Mary, (our manager) and a guy from the Agriculture department who gave us some helpful advice about dealing with water logging on one of our  plots. He was also very encouraging about the progress we have made on the farm. We are ‘learning by doing’ on the farm so we really appreciated a good report from the man from the ministry. As ministry advisors go our visitor was extremely knowledgeable and very professional. I did feel a bit sorry for him. Mary went to a farming workshop this morning and, I think, almost coerced him into visiting us. Mary is currently a woman on a mission with farming and is determined to make the most of every opportunity for improving our farm and advancing her own knowledge, (I am glad to say).

Our visitors have been a great help to us this week and have been hard at work with maths tuition, school field improvements and arts and crafts. It’s always a slightly anxious time as a new team of visitors settles in. I always worry that they won’t like the accommodation, the food, the climate, the activities or any combination of the above. Jessica, Daniel, Peter and Alex have been a delight to have round the place and I know that they have made a good impression on the children and staff. It is always good to spend time with young people who buck every negative stereotype of “the youths” and take what they are doing very seriously.

I also managed to spend some time this evening with our Standard 8 pupils, (the ‘candidates’ for the Kenyan Certificate of Primary Education exam). We have yet to decide how far we are prepared to go in relation to customary practices regarding the length of the school day for this class as they prepare for this important exam. (See yesterday’s blog). I’m sure that we will keep up their evening ’preps’ programme. During a relatively short trip to Kosele it is often difficult to keep on top of my to do list but I want to spend as much time as I can helping out during the evening study time. Our Standard 8 class are a really excellent group of young people and the teacher in me still enjoys the ‘penny drops’ moments you often experience when students are revising.

On a completely different but tangentially related note I also found an absolute gem of a news story in the newspaper that somebody had brought into the classroom this evening. You couldn’t make it up and it really couldn’t happen anywhere else. It would appear that all night dancing parties after male circumcision ceremonies have become an issue in one district in Kenya so the authorities have banned them. The mind boggles. From my understanding of circumcision the last thing I would want to do after experiencing it would be to celebrate, let alone dance all night.

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!

District Mocks

Apart from a flurry of activity first thing this morning making sure that we had enough desks and chairs for the visiting pupils I was pleasantly surprised by the district mock exams today. They did not end up causing as much disruption as I had feared. The only, minor, problem occurred at lunchtime when we had to serve the visiting officials their chicken dinner and looked like running out of suitable plates to serve their meal in. A quick scrounge round the visitors’ centre saved the day and I think the whole programme went off to the satisfaction of all involved. We should have it nailed down to a really slick operation for tomorrow. I am still unable to see the point in running exams in this fashion but there is really no point losing sleep over it as there is nothing we can do about it.  Our pupils seemed confident enough after it was all over.

The water situation is still not resolved. The service engineer should be here tomorrow, according to my latest information. I hope so as we have had no rain today. The timing of the rains is always critical out here in Kenya. I think we may be at the turning point when rainfall becomes less frequent. Good for ripening crops, charging solar batteries and tourism. Bad for keeping clean and feeding the five thousand if the borehole isn’t fixed soon.

I would, again, be grateful to anybody who is up for praying for my wife Judi. Assuming no more delays because of low blood counts she is just over half way through her chemotherapy treatment now. She is trying hard to stick to her normal routine but I know it is very challenging some days. When I last heard from her she said she was feeling well. I pray that she manages to stay that way until her next chemo treatment on July 12^th.

Battlestar Galactica

It has been a good day in Kosele today – despite the bore-hole guy not turning up. It has also been a very long day, (it’s actually now Tuesday as I am typing), so I’m now well past my new regime bedtime. In the interests of making sure I don’t just drift into previous bad habits and actually try and claw back some of the sleep deficit this will be a short post tonight/this morning.

Highlight of the day was a successful Skype call to my wife Judi back home who is having a good day today, having endured what sounds like a couple of chemotherapy induced horrors for the previous couple of days. It is hard focusing over here at times knowing that Judi is having such a rough time but I know it would be frustrating for her if I wasn’t here working on our next steps for this year. It was great to hear her voice after sorting out an initial connection problem. This involved setting up a new account for her, (as I couldn’t remember the password I had originally used for her account), troubleshooting by short messages in order to discover that the microphone didn’t work on her laptop and finally using our daughter Ellie’s laptop, (and Skype ID), to eventually have a conversation lasting an hour and three quarters.

Having been unable to establish basic mobile phone contact at all predictably when we first came to Kenya ten years ago it is incredible being able to have a long, uninterrupted and very cheap chat using Skype. I am, admittedly, a late adopter as far as Skype goes so I guess for many of you Skype isn’t such a miracle. (In my defence this is because I never found a need to use it in the UK and it has only been realistically available over here in the last few months). Suffice to say it has revolutionised our communications and means that Judi can be involved in our day to day operations.

I do have one minor concern. Despite the amazing clarity of the connection for most of the call I think that threatening aliens have got designs on Skype and are using it for their own imperialistic ends. Last year I spent, (to be honest quite a lot of), time watching Battlestar Galactica with my son Tom. For those of you who haven’t watched it I would recommend it. Those of you who have will be familiar with the sound associated with the Cylons, (the ‘baddies’), as they hove into range on Battlestar Galactica’s monitoring systems. (It sounds like a particularly malevolent static). My call home today was definitely interrupted by this sound on a number of occasions. I hope that those with responsibility for planet Earth defences are on the case. If not we should all be very worried.

Back on the chain gang

I can hear the sound of Pretenders fans struggling to remember the words already!

Follow the link for a reminder.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzWNY1zwrjY

As I have blogged previously Sundays tend to be a fairly relaxed affair in Kosele. Despite the imminent district mock exams for our oldest primary school pupils next week (Tuesday and Wednesday), all of the children in our home seem relaxed and in good spirits. The district mocks are, unfortunately, a necessary evil as part of the year long run up to the real KCPE, (Kenya Certificate of Primary Education), exam in November. We will be joined by two other schools’ Standard 8 pupils. Exams will be sat. District statistics will be compiled and I am fairly sure chaos will break out at regular intervals as the mock exam process unfolds.

We enjoyed a couple of nostalgic moments today. Moses, an old friend who was with us when we first started our work ten years ago, came to the church service this morning and was, I think, surprised how much the children have grown since he last saw them a couple of years ago. It was nice for the children to catch up with him again and he spent a few hours with them teaching them some new songs to sing in church. He has known nearly all of them since they were very little and they were very happy to see him. We wish him well as he heads back to Uganda to, hopefully, drum up some trade for his vehicle servicing work there next week.

Our second look back to the past reminded us of the hard work involved in making sure of an adequate water supply before we had a bore-hole. The technician did not turn up yesterday to repair the control panel for our bore-hole pump and we did not have much rain last night. This resulted in empty water tanks for our showers and for our drinking and cooking water. Before we had a bore-hole our water was delivered by a very old tractor pulling a bowser and we had to put it into the main water tank by hand in buckets. This job took our well practised team about forty five minutes. We filled the tanks today by setting up a bucket chain with all of the children. Buckets were filled from the large water tanks on the end of the classrooms and the visitors’ centre and passed down a long line of initially puzzled, then very willing helpers. It took us about an hour to put enough water into the tanks to make sure all the children could have showers and empty about sixty five buckets full, (about six hundred and fifty litres of water), into the drinking water and cooking tank. We had to dash for cover a couple of times to avoid short sharp bursts of rain but should, at least, have enough water to make sure everybody can eat and drink tomorrow. If the technician doesn’t arrive in the morning we will have to do the same thing all over again. An influx of at least fifty more pupils to sit the district mock exams on Tuesday and Wednesday could make the situation a bit more challenging. Still, on today’s evidence the kids are up for it and, as I type, I can hear the start of heavy rainfall on the roof. Reassuring evidence that God does listen to our prayers.