Red and Yellow and Pink and Green....

After a movie night where I slept at Amy and Ellen's house on Friday night, the most exciting thing that has happened recently has been Gemma's birthday party, which was on Saturday night. The theme was colours and we all picked a colour and spent an amusing hour or two at the second-hand-market in town (sells cheap but dubiously stained clothing - Katharine I bought your topshop emo shorts for 2 pounds or something!) finding a wide selection of strange clothing items in our colours. I was red and bought a large tie-died shawl thing that they call lessos here, along with a red waist-belt for 50p :)

So, decked out with our various weird items of clothing, we headed to Karanja's house (where Gemma lives) to begin a colourful and hilarious evening where alcohol was downed through funnels, we all did lots of dancing and bouncing around and screeching at Scooby the dog everytime he ran into the house, covered each other in facepaint of varying degrees of appropriateness, and finally left in the back of a pickup truck to go to Summit, leaving Annie, Rebecca and Becky already in bed at 10pm. We spent a lot of the journey trying to stop Ben tumbling off the top of the pickup truck, and then had lots of fun at Summit doing normal things like yet more dancing, screeching and scaring random Kenyans.

The next day was spent teasing certain people for things they'd done the night before and watching in horror as Gemma continued drinking after no sleep and as part of her I-must-drink-for-four-days-straight-to-celebrate-being-eighteen-idea. She passed out that evening, finally. We also met the two new volunteers, two girls, who seemed nice but rather scared by the interesting morning-after scene they found (I couldn't really blame them!)

Yesterday school started again and I am so happy to be back :) Despite yesterday being spent preparing new textbooks for use (i.e. not all that productive), today was brilliant. Miriam, the teacher I share my class with, was away and so I took them all day, teaching them lots of English and playing a game with them which involved some of the kids acting out different professions. They loved it and went mad when a really funny boy named Isaac, who acts like a clown the entire time, zoomed around the classroom pretending to be a pilot. They also clapped and cheered when I drew a beach on the board to demonstrate the concept of sand, which I didn't really understand! Anyway, I've also started a new behaviour system where they have 50 marbles in a jar, which are increased or reduced according to their behaviour, and if there are 50 still there at the end of each week, I've promised them prizes. They LOVE it and it works so well. They all did my exercise in complete silence, insanely quickly and well earlier and then cheered when I gave them a marble for it.

Another awesome piece of news is that we got the results from last term back yesterday, compared to the other 46 schools in the area. Nakuru Workers, my school, is NUMBER ONE in nearly every class and subject, and my class, Annie's class and Rebecca's class are ALL the best in the area for English. SO SO SO HAPPY. It feels better than I can explain to feel that you had something to do with that.