Please teacher, may I hit the nails on my desk with a rock?

Teaching is very fun but was very scary to start with! I've been assigned (mainly, they're very flexible) to a class of 60 children between about 9-11 and so far have taught English, Science and P.E. (ha) . P.E. is the most fun because we can do whatever we want, as long as the kids are moving around, so we just play lots of games. We've tried the hokey-cokey with them and our aim is to get all 600 children in the school doing it by the time we leave :D

Teaching English is a lot more difficult than I realised it would be; it's hard explaining how a sentence structure works or what a particular phrase means if you have no idea how to say it in swahili. I'm enjoying the challenge though.

The kids at the school are absolutely awesome; they are the loveliest, happiest people ever and will join in with whatever you start doing with them. They're very funny though as often we sit at the back of classes observing other lessons to get ideas for teaching, and the children will just turn around and grin at you every few minutes as if to check that you're still there and you're still white. They've already taught me a complicated clapping routine and we had a big singing session with the lower school kids (between 5 and 8ish) which was SO cute.

Everything else about the school is less happy. The teachers are lovely to us (one of them feeds me a weird type of Kenyan porridge every break time) but they have so little passion for teaching that it's depressing. They teach the most boring lessons and hit the children so much. It's technically illegal to cane children in Kenya, but on Thursday I saw literally every child in the class caned at least 3 times. Two 9-year-old girls forgot to write the date in their book and were hit over the leg until they were weeping and screaming. It was absolutely horrible but there's nothing we can do about it other than not doing it ourselves and hiding the canes whenever we have a chance. It was really shocking to see but it's made me want to be a really good teacher and friend to the kids. The school itself is also very poor, with no electricity, plumbing (toilets=holes in the ground which are the most foul thing ever) or shade for the kids at lunch.

On weekdays, my general day starts at about 7am; we wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and walk to school for 8am and then teach, play with the children (yes I know how that sounds in your mind Will) and observe other lessons until about 3.30-4 when we walk back home. It's properly exhausting but so much fun.

This weekend we have been into Nakuru on both Friday and Saturday night, which involved quite a lot of drunkenness (not from me I'd like to add, although the fact that I'm insanely clumsy all the time has made a few people think I've drunk a lot more than I actually have). On Friday night we went to a bar called Taidy's, which does very good food, but where I gained 2 Kenyan boyfriends because my friend Amy was very drunk and decided to just assign men to random people. Luckily they seemed alright with a handshake and a smile and didn't care too much when I disappeared in horror. After Taidy's we found a very cute little Kenyan club with a good dance floor, but at this point the evening went down hill as some people had started drinking at 5pm and so by this point were at the collapsing-on-the-floor stage and needed looking after by the sober ones such as myself. The consequences of this drunkenness were very funny though.

Last night (Saturday) we went to another club called Summit, which is literally right on the border of Lake Nakuru National Park with lions, giraffes etc. It had a nice log fire that we sat around and a grassy area where we lay and admired the AMAZING stars until someone screamed 'OH NO THERE ARE SAFARI ANTS' and we all leapt up in terror. I had a good evening but I missed having people around with similar attitudes to alchohol and random Kenyan men as myself.

So today is Sunday and I am very tired, having not got home til 5am last night. I am looking foward to some sleep tonight :)

ps. Oh and the explanation behind the title of this blog is that if the children need the toilet, they come to me, as the teacher, put their hands together as though praying, and say 'please teacher, may I go to the toilet'. Often they mumble or their english isn't very good, and so we generally just say yes even if we can't hear what they're saying. So Rebecca, one of my friends I'm living with, did this the other day, and the response of the boy was to leave the classroom and return a few minutes later with a large rock. He promptly started whacking the loose nails on his desk, and those on the desks of any kid who put their hand up, with the rock. Extremely funny.