Jan and Corneel are in the computer room with me. We swapped blog addresses*. Then they informed me theirs is in Dutch. Pah. Useless. How am I meant to read a site in Dutch?

Nah, those two are great. Given how many comments I got on a two line post, I thought I'd do you the courtesy of expanding a little...

Later. Because I have to go do stuff now. Why does that always happen?

*Nicole, they're called URLs nowadays.

Mish is getting deported!

Ok not really. But I am on my way to the immigration department to put in an appeal for my working visa which they are refusing to allow for various reasons and which has thus far prevented me from getting a residential permit. So I've been here on a tourist visa, which is fine for three months... and as of today I've been here for three months. So, either they let all my paperwork go through, or else I have to leave the country and re-enter to get a new visa. Fun stuff. I don't really mind, a spontaneous trip up to Kenya or South to Malawi will be interesting, but still, it's a bit of a pain, we're talking a twenty hour round bus trip. You'll know in a day or two how it went I suppose...

Cry me a river

So. You know how I was telling you about the rain yesterday. Well, it rained all night, and we woke up to find the garden under water, and the road a river. Seriously. We're talking knee deep and flowing strongly. Awesome.

 

And this is Tessa's bright idea for getting to the McFarlane's house (who were on carpool duty) without being soaked by the rain...

Can YOU dodge a wrench?

Yep. We’ve well and truly hit the rainy season. First swimming class of the day was cut short again – one of the power lines dropped across the track that runs around the back of the school, and was shorting out and flashing a freaky amount of sparks in noisy bursts. Given that this was all of twenty metres from the pool, we got the kids out pronto. I wasn’t doing so well with the teaching anyway, as the rain was so heavy that the kids couldn’t hear me properly, and it was getting to the point where visibility was so poor that it wasn’t safe to have that many children in the water.

The whole school is off power right now. Power in Tanzania = unreliable. Power in Tanzania when it’s raining = well, to take a note from Hui’s economic’s analysis, 100% reliably not there. The only reason I can be typing this is that the computer room can run off generator power for about four hours, so right now it’s kind of a nice place to be. It being so overcast, the rest of the classrooms are pretty dark and uninviting. No internet though – that’s the first thing to go when the power shuts off. I shall be posting this up at a later time.

Wow. I’ve been here for sixteen minutes and it’s still pouring. Given that it started about ten minutes into the swimming lesson, that’s about fifty minutes of heavy rain. This is ridiculous. Ridiculously cool, but still ridiculous. It would be nice if it was raining like this in Benalla.

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Ok, next swimming class was cancelled too, because it was still raining too heavily. So instead they just had PE. Brandon was taking the class of course, but I figured I'd stick around. We played dodgeball for an hour and a half. It was awesome.

It has now been raining with great enthusiasm from 7:45 until 11:15 and doesn't look like stopping anytime soon. Very cool. Except for what it does to the roads around here. Bet you there'll be a lot of cars bogged today...

Blur darter!

Was leading the fasa fris session this afternoon, when the boys noticed that the gardeners were behaving rather oddly. One of them would charge full speed down the path, hit a certain point, screech to a halt, and dash back the other way. I have since made the assumption that they were daring each other to see how close they could get to the ‘thing’ (soon to be revealed) but at the time it just seemed very childish.

I immediately deduced that as I don't possess enough control of these kids to keep their attention in said circumstance, it was to my tactical advantage to shout out loudly "oh cool! Let's go see what they've found!" drop the disc and rush off. Turned out they'd disturbed a huge lizard - Tanzanian's are quite superstitious about lizards, and this fellow was likely to have had his head squished in as soon as they'd gathered up the courage to get close.

International Day!

I haven't uploaded any of my own photos yet, it's a time consuming task, but I will scam some photos from Jan and Corneel's collections to show you a bit of the colour...

The Australian contingent:

Traditional Tanzanian dance troupe:

Korean fan dance: