When it rains...

We had a very impressive storm tonight - it was amazing to see how quickly the ground turned from being a dust bowl to being completely flooded. The photo below is taken from our front door looking across the yard to the girl's hostel. There isn't the drainage system so although the house has gutters and downpipes they discharge straight on to the ground a small distance from the house. Thankfully the floor of the house is a couple of feet higher!

E3L or English as a third language...

I have been busy marking the exam papers today. I can really see the impact of the fact that for many of our learners English is their third language. Khoekhoegowab or Nama is their mother tongue, then they learn Afrikaans at primary school, and in grade 4 they start to learn English - which is the official language of Namibia. It was hard enough for my learners in the UK to learn all the names of the quadrilaterals but in your third language... it wasn't surprising to see that one learner when asked to name a shape forgot that I has said a parallelogram was LIKE a squashed rectangle and wrote "squashed rectangle" as their answer!
Evenings have been busy this week with last minute revision classes - the photo below shows some of the grade 8 girls earlier this week.

Store in a cool dry place...

I made some soup this week (it is alright we haven't been living just on soup!) the instructions on the packet amused me "Store in a cool dry place" Well dry we can certainly do here in Namibia but cool! The temperatures are getting steadily hotter as we approach summer - mornings and evenings are definately the best times of the day!

We realised we hadn't posted pictures of the girls in their school uniforms - it has been wonderful to see how they have settled at Ruimte Primary School. Courtney heard this week that she is being promoted to grade 5 in January.

Thanksgiving & Powercuts

I became a traitor yesterday when as a team we celebrated Thanksgiving, I'm still not quite sure I understand exactly the history of the day but it was a good excuse to eat too much and enjoy a relaxed time together as a team. The team has been added to again with the arrival of Bernie from Ireland.

Just as we wound up the celebrations we had a complete blackout (again) taking folks home with no streetlights was quite an interesting experience!

Powercuts are quite a feature of the rainy season but it does make for a frustrating experience as the UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) that is supposed to keep our main server going doesn't and so even a short outage takes several minutes to recover from.

This week will be the third week with Ruth back in the UK - it certainly made my birthday this week different from any other I have celebrated and it is the longest time we have been apart in our 27 years of marriage.

I received an email on my birthday from a colleague from Tile Hill Wood - my old school in the UK she took over my tutor group. It was good to hear that they are still the great bunch of kids that they were and that they have been following this blog too - so Hi 8B!

The girls are getting impatient to go back to our flat - I've been quite encouraged at how they have managed without TV here. BUT they do pester to watch movies on the laptop!