George Bush vs The Sunset

Well, one thing’s for sure, the honeymoon is definitely over. It had promised to be a quiet week after the excitement of last week’s influx of new students at the school. Not so. It would even be safe to say that it ended up being one of the worst weeks since our arrival here last July.

From the outset of the week, we arrived at school Monday to find out that the generator, which had broken down on Friday and supposedly was to be fixed over the weekend, was still in disrepair. No electricity at school all day Monday, which made it more or less a comatose day. Try it next summer on a very hot day...round up 60+ people, most of them kids, confine them to a small space, cut the electricity, and see what happens...a bit like getting a root canal without local anesthetic.

Beautiful full moon all week, really nice to look at, but one does not need to be a biophysicist to know that a full moon and kids don’t mix. As any person in education knows, a full moon galvanizes the best disciplined kids into something they normally aren’t, mischievous, yet always cute urchins. I used to think that this was the case only in North America. Wrong. Like global warming, we're all in it together. The moon seems to have this metamorphic effect on kids all over the planet, even in Africa. They arrive at school already wired and it’s basically downhill from there. In my professional opinion, eleven year old girls appear to be the worst off. Their modus vivendi appears to be the least immune and most sensitive to the full moon's adverse effect; they tend to start acting like 11 year old girls.

Then, of course, with all those new kids having been parachuted into our school from everywhere in the world, I needed to deal with placement issues. Trying to convince parents that their 7 year old genius of a child was in Grade 2 in our system, and not in Grade 8, like he was in Uganda, can be a tad trying sometimes, especially when there is no electricity, and its hot, and you’re impatient when you see all the time sensitive work that needs to be done by the end of the day strewn on your desk, and you’re interrupted by the shriek and subsequent giggles of a slough of 11 year old girls in the hallway who have just discovered a butterfly caught in a spider’s web... anyways, you get the picture...not a good week.

Both disheartened, Madeleine and I spent Thursday evening talking about our options, counting the days until next summer, then until June 2012...not a good space of mind to be in. Madeleine decided to go sit in front of the ocean with the hope of rekindling her inner peace whilst pensively admiring the golden african sunset reflecting on the incoming tide, all the while the gentle waves of salt water sloshing around her tired feet. I opted to start reading Decision Points by George Bush.

Surprisingly, my self therapy tactic seemed to have worked better than hers; Madeleine came back from her spiritual pilgrimage by the ocean in a pissier mood than when she left. I, on the other hand, decided that, even though life sucked this week, there is no other place I would rather be.

And that is the kind of week it’s been.