Wednesday 14 November 2007

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...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

must be a strange change from Melbourne, the occurrence of rain!!
I'm still trying to work out where that wrench comment came into effect.. I'll ponder it some more.