tony’s blog

When you’re away for 3 months, people notice gradual changes. Family are beginning to look at me with concern. There is generally a move to ensure someone else drives the car. Relatives are kind and set limits to what I am asked to do, to protect the old guy. I perceive that a part of dementing is being a constant disappointment to family members. Never mind – they aren’t stopping me driving yet.

Actually, coming back from Guyana was quite a culture shock this time. First, the weather suddenly changed to British Standard Winter: for two weeks it drizzled gently 24/7, cloud ceiling about 10 feet, dark grey days, walking the dog with everything dripping and muddy. I yearned for those machine-gun tropical downpours which last 20 minutes and leave flooding and blinding sunshine. After 2 weeks it felt like I was holding my breath. … Then at LAST it froze, and I could breathe – even though the humidity was suddenly zero.

The other ingredient was pressure. Wading through sewage-laden floods, emptying emails and refilling printer cartridges every day or so were a fairly constant, predictable pressure. At home I found a huge backlog of house jobs (urgent now it’s freezing up), a backlog of snailmail and bills (still under my bed), a daughter just facing important exams and needing transport because I repossessed my car, a son and family coming home from Switzerland, and a daughter and family moving house to the end of our street with 2 new grandchildren! Not to mention a wife exhausted from doing all the Christmas preparation for the family of 11.

I think I now understand why old people BECOME demented when they are moved into a hospital or a home. It’s overload.

Technology continues to frustrate. I borrowed Roz’s car with its “pop-out” key to take Kody to church on Sunday. Nice service, and I even played the bass. Then out to the car … and can’t get the key to pop out. Totally impossible. I fought for half an hour with teeth and nails, table-knives and penknives … and finally a merciful success. Back at home Roz stared in amazement – “I never close that key!”

And patience continues to deteriorate. You know you’re impatient when other people drive SLOWER THAN EVER, and regulations get ever more petty. Keep reminding myself that they’re not the ones that are changing.

Hey, there’s lots of good stuff! The memories of Guyana are amazing – we really helped some people. And my family are all well, albeit with ups and downs. And the church music is still wonderful. And how splendid to run computers without worrying that they’ll melt down in the heat, or that the internet will cut off in the middle of something crucial. Things here actually work. And now I have grandchildren withing easy walking distance … and even a swimming pool!

I had other ideas for this post – wonder where they got to? And what else got lost with them?

GK

Ooh good, I thought, my shoulder’s better! So I stopped the pain-killers, and it wasn’t. And then I bought milk at Nigel’s and lifted the backpack onto my shoulders, and strained it again. Bollocks.

And the pain-killers made my ankles swell up like a bag-lady’s – quite alarming until I realized why it was happening. “Acute Old Age” I thought in terror.

You know you’re nearly done in Guyana when your pills are running out. And you know the words of the choruses that this year’s students sing at devotions each morning.

Mind you, it’s a good thing we’re leaving. The laundry half-melted my shirts by accident, so they’re like crumpled paper. I ironed them like crazy (unbelievably, we have an ironing board that’s broken but an iron that works), so now they’re also a bit grey. The iron was of course thickly coated with spray-on donut – whatever do people expect to get, when they iron spray-on starch?

Hey, we went to an international soccer match! Trinidad played Guyana in the early qualifier to the World Cup, and a student took us … onto the pitch! He is an ambulance driver, and the ambulance is drawn up on the actual grass, about 30 feet from the edge of the pitch. So I stood on the footboard of the ambulance – if you watched the match on TV you would have seen me. AND I got to shake our goalie’s hand after the match. (He was amazing – 9 feet tall beanpole who kept popping up all over the field … with the ball in his hands.) And the FIFA man who spoke to us was from Bethnal Green, from his accent.

The match was exciting – we scored, then again … but it was disallowed as offside, then they scored, … then we scored right at the last moment. The smallest player was a head taller than me. And one Trini attacker was actually unstoppable, so much faster than anyone else that it required 3 defenders to foil him. Cor.

The students continue to amaze. I told John off for cynicism (he wrote that doctors press cancer patients to have treatment in order to benefit their research studies). Then I marked the papers, and the FIRST student, kind sweet innocent S, had answered “because the doctor hopes to make more money treating the patient if he lives longer”. Boggle.

We amaze them too. We took them to the morgue, and the first body was a pretty 18-year-old girl who suicided. Quite thought-provoking. And there had been a fight, with several fatal stabbings – all the bodies were young and fit, making the scene hard to believe. Mind-bogglingly, one of the students had been there before to see his father’s postmortem …

And the staff amaze. A young schizophrenic’s mother died, then he burnt the house down, was admitted to a surgical ward to have the hand cleaned … and the nurses discharged him “home”! Fortunately John discovered him, found he had neither clothes, shoes, money nor house, and we fixed him up a bit and sent him to a charity. But even now, no-one has bothered to offer him any treatment for his schizophrenia. So we may expect more fires.

OK. I have to confess I am too old.

A sweet young student presented me (in front of the class) with a thank-you note, and I swept her off her feet in a big hug, to applause from the class, a camera-flash from John, and (later) total agony in my right shoulder. Tim put the pic on Facebook, and I have stumbled around with my arm in a sling for 3 days. Got lots of sympathetic enquiries, and told them all that John hit me – “he’s an abusive husband, you know”. We shall probably get arrested.

Under pressure, I consulted the nice doctor here who took over John’s old flat. She confirmed the diagnosis and started me on analgesics, including an injection – given by one of our old students! Mildly embarrassing, but hey, when you’re past it, you don’t care.

But wearing the sling was interesting. I suddenly realized what it’s like being depressed. EVERYTHING is an effort, even just washing or getting dressed. You wake up and don’t want to start the day! And you get tired so quickly, and everything takes so long. Thank God my arm is almost better now. I think.

Went to a fashion show yesterday. We sat on the sidewalk, fenced off from the parked cars by large pot-plants, took “afternoon tea”, and watched while models walked (or rather tottered) past us. The girls were hugely tall (helped by the 10″ stiletto heels), slim and beautiful. The dresses were tight-fitting and neat. The hats were ridiculous – looked like someone’s left-over Christmas wrapping paper piled up. And the male models were slim, sullen AND ugly. Weird.

The action was enlivened by the agitated fussing of the eminently gay black impresario – about 30, bejewelled, intelligent and dominating. “Send Paul. And Deirdre. Now!” We took a 14-year-old staff daughter that John has known for 10 years. I think she enjoyed it.

Ever wondered what the “Rotarians” are? It’s a dinner-and-chat club! You find a group of people who can afford a whole evening of good food and drink once a week, and meet at each other’s houses in rotation. (Here you meet on the deck, or under the house.) You set the world to rights, meet any interesting professionals who are new to the community, and relax. Claudette, who is helping us teach, invited us again last night – great fun. I met a lady whose husband worked closely with the mad President who tore up the railway to sell the iron: she said it was his personal foible. (Not his only one. At one point he made it illegal to possess any wheat flour, because “we must be self-sufficient”.)

The food last night was amazing – and made me realize what the problem is here. Most Indians eat with their fingers (you grab a bunch of rice or puri in your fingers, then mop around the gravy with it). So lots of little bones in the food are no problem – you just pick them up and chew round them, or dig them out of your mouth. Whereas if you’re a neurotic germ-phobic Canadian …

Well, we have just 3 weeks to go in the heat, and yet ANOTHER laptop has died of heat-stroke. I am anxiously nursing my LAST ONE, right under the fan, propped up on books for ventilation, with my fingers crossed … However, the new young IT technician (Hansel) is turning out both talented and helpful – a huge help.

I’ve found yet another reason why everyone except Carrs like the “tap-function” on laptop touch-pads. If you don’t touch-type nor play the piano, you can only use one finger at a time! So to use the left-click button would be quite tedious, much easier just to tap the pad with your one finger.

I’m proof-reading a book for a slightly dyslexic colleague. Interesting, and sometimes taxing. How would you correct “hilters rain”? And Matt’s watch is beginning to dissolve, under the daily onslaught of bugspray. Time to come home!

My piano lessons continue – now two adults and two children. But must remember for next time: essential equipment for a pianist is one of those huge metal spring paper-clips (looks like an old-fashioned hair-grip). See, the fans blow the pages off your music-stand unless you clip them down or hold them, and playing one-handed gets boring.

Tim sent a link to the BrainSoft video he made. Wow! He’s famous. Hey, that’s my son! Yep.

GK

Life on our building site has now become routine. Loud shouts and crashes under the bed from 6am to 6pm. Concrete mixer outside the window from 8am-6pm. Mud and filth and sand everywhere, but everyone quite happy, and hunky half-naked black men wheeling sand – about 2,000 wheelbarrowsful so far.

Once it stopped. And John came into my room exhausted and said “Please could you get them to restart the concrete mixer? I want to take a nap.”

We took all 40 girls (aged 5-15) from the orphanage for a swim in a donated pool on Diwali (Hindu festival of lights). They screamed and jumped all over us for 4 hours. Then lunch at the orphanage (burgers, donated). At my table one looked Indian, two African, 3 Amerindian (light brown and flat faces), and 2 the amazing Guyanese mixture – all of them sweet and monstrous!

Equipment dies daily. TWO laptops have now died of heat stroke, taking with them my labours. Two desktops from Taju’s restaurant have defied my repair efforts. And I knocked over my fan and killed it – but happily I did manage to mend that.

Family is Skypable sometimes, and it’s such fun with the infants! I “roared” at Noyz, and he screamed in fear … guess the picture must look quite lifelike, oh dear. And Ed did an amazing job of keeping Jazz on-screen for nearly an hour, until the internet died here.

We’re having a cold spell (26C) and I’m drinking HOT DRINKS for the first time. Wonderful. Not tea, alas – the milk tastes odd.

It’s cloudy and rainy. Yesterday I biked to church along the sea wall starting in sunshine and ending in a tropical downpour, totally soaking me. Happily I had stopped and put my shirt in my plastic bag with the music sheets, so I sat in my dry shirt and wet shorts in the air-conditioned church, cold in Guyana for the first time ever.

And today there was a 4″ deep flood all the way from here to the nursing school (60m) – so we missed devotions. Hope the waters recede by 11am!

My “kids’ story” at church is slowly becoming a fixture: yesterday they remembered without being reminded, for the first time. And sometimes the congregation even applauds. Hope I can find someone to continue it.

An experienced missionary related how, when he first went to Africa for 2 years as a bachelor, he lamented on the lack of eligible girl-friends, because he doesn’t find black girls attractive. “Don’t worry”, said his colleagues, “they get whiter every day.”

I was arguing with Ed a while ago about the strong anti-church prejudice in our society – he disagreed. Last week I sat with 3 mature, educated Canadians, who pronounced themselves absolutely CERTAIN that Christian church officials were just as likely to be unfaithful to their wives as anyone else! They knew of no evidence, but were so certain that they were astonished I could disagree. Wow. The Devil has done his work well.

Oh wait – they don’t believe in the Devil …

GK

The students never fail to amaze. They celebrated “Food Day” (yup) by turning the entire classroom into a fast-food store – with really yummy cheese straws and pineapple/ginger juice. Alas, our sneaky research nurse got in first and bought all the pickled onions (sob).

An ex-student is at the Uni … and was told to spend a morning begging on the streets! He did, and came back with interesting stories. Almost the only people to give anything were stall-holders. (Maybe so you go away?)

His brother took us around the local flour mill (the only one in Guyana). Wheat grains come from Canada (exclusively) by boat, get sieved and ground endlessly, then bagged. Wonderful slight bakery smell, and floors and steps everywhere slippery with flour. Most amazing sight was a row of four HUGE wooden “wardrobes” – nicely panelled wooden 10-foot cubes – all dancing in a row, literally shaking around a foot off the floor. Looked totally grotesque, like a dream.

Ooh yeah, and yesterday my pee turned really bright royal blue! Turned out to be a dream, following endless fiddling with printer cartridges.

Another bizarre sight at the flour mill was the pigeons. The sorting towers are 4-foot tubes, 30 feet high, and the sections are bolted together with just enough flange for a pigeon to stand SIDEWAYS. So every flange had a single row of pigeons standing nose-to-tail all round it in single file, looking just like toys on a display.

Hebrew is still interesting. “Le Meghan” means on account of.

Married life is good – found John sweeping my room AGAIN this morning. Mind you, he has the most engaging way of stealing my stuff: “That’s my marker!” (“but … but … oh, ok”).

I must be kinder, though. The other day he went to the fridge and fumbled, and suddenly the whole thing exploded into crashing shards of broken glass and tumbling bottles. I screamed with laughter behind him … but then it turned out to be my fault. I had stacked too many heavy items on the glass shelf, and it disintegrated wonderfully. Oops.

I lay in bed one morning thinking “must oil that fan”, then got up to find new noisy machines outside the window. It’s been bedlam here all month – you can’t hear yourself think, with machines and men shouting and dropping things. Wow. However, they are working fast. I asked one supervisor how they get the pillars exactly vertical, and he said “with a laser level, of course”. (Nervous giggle.)

They’re building the new building on sand!! They put down tiny foundations, concreted “walls” up to waist height, and are filling the “rooms” with sand, thousands of wheel-barrrows-full, by armies of men along planks. Apparently you have to build high because of the floods and wet ground, and it’s too expensive to lay lots of concrete, so they build on sand. Don’t read the OT, I guess.

We had some rainy days, and the temp dropped to 26C … and the students turned up in sweaters! Boggle. And the rain washed my bugstuff off, so I got bitten.

But I’m not totally past it. Shopping in the covered market, a stall-lady asked John to photograph her with me! Said she fancied me. She reluctantly admitted she was 42, and was horrified to learn my age.

And at last I realize why small black boys wear such huge shoes. You know, 10-year-olds with matchstick legs ending in size 12 gym shoes? It’s because their feet are huge, because they’re going to be 6’6″ tall! The feet are amazing. GK

Around 6am the bugle wakes the recruits at the police training college. Soon after that the guy starts cutting rebar with his skillsaw under our beds. Soon the site is fully active – men carrying loads of rebar in, men plaiting rebar with tie-wire into cages, men trundling wheelbarrows full of sand onto the site, men hammering planks to make moulds … never a dull moment. On Monday Tony, folder in hand, met a worker and said “When does the concrete arrive?” There was a moment of TOTAL rapport, as his eyes lit up. “Tomorrow!”

And sure enough, there’s concrete up to ankle level so far, in neat troughs, with loops of rebar growing out of it like weird fungus. Over on the old building there are workmen balanced on edge beams of the 3rd-floor roof, no helmet, no tie-on, nothing, hauling up concrete blocks by hand, one-by-one, even in the dark. No-one has fallen off yet, but we’ve taught the students about intracranial bleeds and are expecting a test patient.

Teaching is turbulent. To get her interested in our teaching method, we arranged a nice knee “problem” for the anatomy tutor Elsie, who was delighted – and announced that she was leaving THAT DAY for 2 weeks, during which the students should study the knee!

She then kindly offered some of the vacant teaching time to us … starting at 8am the following morning. Groan. We’ve done some – and are hoping to stretch out the knee (ha) until she gets back.

Meanwhile we ASKED the students if they would like us to use some of her teaching time … and they said no! Lazy buggers.

On the plus side, John has developed a love-affair with an editor, and got our article accepted for publication! Wow. He has spent hours on it. Good for him.

Chance is sometimes unbelievable. Has it occurred to you that printed tables of random numbers are not random? (If they were, there’s a chance that the whole first page would be nines.)

Tony’s pills are all in 1 bottle – red, pink, white and orange. One night he needed 4 red pills, shook the bottle, and out came 4 red pills! The next-but-one night exactly the same thing happened again. Mind you, the next morning he needed 1 white pill, and bugger me – he had to pour out half of the entire bottle to get one.

And sometimes life here is nakedly brutal. “N” is 5, speaks only Caribe (the tribe which gave the name to the islands), and arrived at the orphanage alone last weekend, shipped out from the jungle. There are 40 girls and 8 staff there – and none speak a word of Caribe. She stood and watched us, wordlessly, thin and lost.

Unbelievably, John found a Ministry of the Interior (not bowels), found an official who told him no-one in the entire ministry spoke Caribe, remonstrated … and the guy turns up within the hour at the orphanage with a new-mother-and-tiny-baby from a hostel. The mum was dim but did speak Caribe, the baby was a good disarmer of shyness, and voila! Uwek is ‘no’, and (believe it or not) Uh-huh is ‘yes’. N told us her mum was dead, her dad had gone away, and she WANTED TO GO HOME.

We heard the next day that he has been jailed for molesting her. Home has disappeard. GK

The “Guyana Exposition” was held last weekend. One of last year’s students kindly invited us to go with her in her car! Basically a bit like a country fair, but at night and no animals. Stalls from flour mills, poultry growers, feed merchants, plus crafts, lots of drink stalls, fast food, and VERY loud music.

We had a good time being led around by the glamorous student in tiny shorts, meeting all her friends. Then she dropped us off and went home – and got attacked by 3 young black men outside her house. Fortunately they were interested only in her car keys, AND granny heard the commotion and got the door open, AND she’s a good runner. So the thieves painted a replica of her license plates, put it on their car, and robbed a store! Boggle.

Well, we now live on a building site. There is a loud compressor running all day outside the window, the yard is full of parked cars, the side lawn has been turned into a temporary shed, and men sit underneath our rooms cutting up rebar by hand with skill-saws and bending it by hand, with much merriment (and unbelievable accuracy). Raucous jokes and loud shouts add variety. Today it’s so quiet (Sunday) that we can actually hear the traffic roaring past.

Married life continues. 2 days ago John put a new bag in the garbage bin again, and said loudly “The garbage bags are here, IF YOU SHOULD EVER WANT ONE …”

Walking over to 8am devotions we were greeted by blocked-off windows and two excited students, who said “you have to come back at 9am!”. Turns out it was “Teacher Appreciation Day”. They decorated the whole room, laid a table for 7 in the middle, cooked hot food, wrote poems, made speeches – it was amazing! (And used up all morning, but who cares?)

We are very excited because Elsie, the African anatomy teacher, has cautiously agreed to try Problem Based Learning in her class. We have written a “problem” on the knee joint, are getting it vetted by experts in Hamilton (what does a shrink know about knee-joints?), and hope to help her try it out next week …. maybe.

I realize how lucky I’ve been, that hearing-aid technology has kept up with my increasing needs. First they separated speaker-from-microphone, so less squealing > stronger amplification. Then they added RF-modulation, so you can control the waveform without distortion > even more amplification. Then they invented “ski-slope” aids, so you can get the HF without blasting your eardrums. Now even this is not enough … come on guys, quick!

My room contains ONE mosquito, a really sneaky one. Only comes out at night when I can’t see. (Can’t hear him any time – hey, I’m deaf AND it’s a building-site.) Almost never comes above waist-level. Just occasionally flies past the computer screen (and immediately disappears). He bites me about once every 2 days. …. Watch this space.

Nice cereal, but on day 3 ants ran out like crazy when I poured the milk on. Bugs 2, Tony 0.

But I think I’ve found the answer to one question. Vic noticed that only OUR family has trouble with the “tap” function on computers. You know, you’re typing merrily away, and something just brushes the touchpad, and suddenly you’re typing gibberish in some unexpected part of your document, or loading totally unwanted programs as soon as you try to move the pointer. She noticed that none of her friends complain of this.

Well, I’ve been watching other computer users. It’s because we touch-type! Other users are watching their fingers all the time, and if they go near the touch-pad at all they stroke it very cautiously under direct vision. We’re looking at the screen. Ha!

Still trying to run “children’s time” at the church. PLEASE, anyone got any ideas?
GK

I’ve done it! I’ve been to the tallest watefull in the world. Kaietur falls are FIVE times taller than Niagara (boggle), although way less water.

But the real fun is – you can get right up to the edge. NO safety fence or anything else. Here is a co-traveller:

and you may think she is brave, standing at the edge of a thousand-foot drop straight down. But wait til you see what she’s standing on!

I took the third photo standing next to 2 ladies. I shouted “Give her a kiss!” (like any good paparazzi) … and the lady next to me said “Er – that’s my husband” and the other one said “And that’s my daughter”. Oops.

We were standing on the edge of the fairly straight rock edge, and could walk right up to the water as it ran over the edge …

I actually walked almost to the edge of the water, but the man in army fatigues behind me got restless and motioned me back to rejoin the group. Sounds dangerous, but I’m standing on solid flat rock, all by myself – it would take a fluke hurricane to blow me over.

I had been a bit worried by the flight. The vast majority of air crashes are small planes flying in the bush – they don’t make the headlines because only a few people die …

To my amazement, the Guyanese ARMY runs the tour! It’s a way of keeping their planes in use, and making some money. So we had military pilots, a soldier as cabin guard, and he also guarded us inconspicuously on the walks around. The plane was a Harbin Y2 14-seater, not exactly new. But at least it gets regularly serviced!

We also stopped at a smaller multiple waterfall you can swim in. We did. And found a hot shower!! (a place where the water ran slowly over rock so hot in the sun that it really did provide a hot shower.)

Did you know Skype has two HUNDRED Daneilles listed?

The Nurse Practitioner helping us announced that, as of this month, NP’s in Canada can diagnose illnesses and prescribe medications for them, without supervision. Mmm. I valiantly stayed quiet. But …

Are NPs are as good as doctors for this purpose? If yes, surely we can stop training doctors? NPs are cheaper and quicker to train. OR, if no, is it fair to patients?

I told John crossly there was too much beer in our (small) fridge. He explained this was an oxymoron.

The bravest mosquito EVER flew into my shower and alighted on a dry patch of white wall at eye-level. RIP.

One student offered to take us out for ice-cream last week. Sure enough, he turned up in his step-dad’s car (elegant), with GF, took us to an ice-cream shop, we wandered the street eating it, then he drove us to his home, took a cake he had just baked for his brother’s birthday, cut us slices, then drove past 3 beautiful girls and they handed a cell-phone through the window (“oh, it’s my lesbian cousin”) and then home. Wow! Amazing trip.

Leapt up the other day, slathered the bug-repellent all over my arms – it didn’t spread quite as easily as usual – and then realized it was RAID! So I shoved bug-repellent on top of it (I was already late), and got disgustingly slimy. Ugh.

My laptops sit “on blocks” (paperbacks), so air can get underneath them. Even so, they get almost red-hot, and one keeps closing down in fright.

Today’s visualization exercise. Take a huge cube of white expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam). Place it on a graph, with its left bottom front corner at the origin, and its left bottom side running north along the Y axis. Draw a black line along the bottom front edge (i.e. along the X axis). Go behind the cube, and draw a hyperbola from the top west back corner to the bottom east back corner.

Now get a long hot-wire knife, hold it along the bottom east edge, and keeping it in a north-south plane, gradually cut through the cube moving westwards, following both black lines. You will enter the cube along its bottom east edge, and exit through its front west side.

IIUC, you have made a 3D graph of BMI (z) vs height (x) and weight (y). Almost.

See also

http://revjoc.blogspot.com/

GK

Woo-hoo, a spare afternoon! We gave out 20 laptops to our 20 students (John gave and raised the money), and spent 2 HOURS guiding them through installing programs, icons, etc. They are quite pleased! I’m sure there will be tragedies, but hey, it’s all working for now. We even fixed up a wireless router in the classroom (in a locked box), so they can reach the internet from their desks.

The heat is back. I love my fan.

I went to the posh store and bought a pair of very thin shorts, which I can JUST get into. A bit chagrined to find the label says “Extra-Large”. People are slim here – some of the Indian-extraction students look as though the wind will blow them over.

One student got called out of class yesterday by her equally pretty, tearful sister, to be told they’re both homeless as of now. Their relative moved, and suddenly the new landlord is refusing so many family members. Ouch. I can’t move them in here.

John laughs at me for my mosquito-net, but it really gives an enormous sense of “bedroom”. And when I get up, and furl it all neatly away, it’s as though the bedroom magically disappears, and there’s just a large clean room with a small bed in one corner.

Last night I woke, thought sweatily, and came to a horrid realization – the fan had stopped! Sure enough, open eyes, see the blades motionless next to the bed. Ah well, power cut, never mind. So I doze … Still off, wow! Poor John – he has the windows closed and the a/c on – he’ll be suffocating. Doze off … Wow, STILL off, now it’s really hot. Er – an awful thought – crawl out of mosquito-net – yup, I forgot to turn the fan on. Bother!

We are still using up ink cartridges every 3-4 DAYS. Thank goodness I brought my ink-filler kit.

I now realize why palm trees survive in the tropics. They grow from the inside! So there is no soft bark around the young tree for animals to nibble away (there are a LOT of animals!)

No invitation to teach piano this time … my erst-while student is moving house, so maybe just too busy. I’m teaching a splendid young man (university student at church) to play the classical guitar, and Vic is wonderfully scanning music for us. And we ran a “revival meeting” at the BelleVue church last week. It is amazing walking around the streets and shouting at people! (You don’t knock on the door here, partly because it’s quite an obstacle course to get across ditches and through chunks of corrugated iron to get into the yard. You just shout from the street.) We had fun, and MAYBE the church will do something new …

Interesting discussions with the family on-line, and with John. Two conclusions:

(1) High schools are failing, not because teachers are worse. (They were never brilliant.) Failing because we are attempting the impossible. “Schooling” assumes you can MAKE children do what you want: in 1870 the new law said kids have to stay in school every day to age 11, and that was easy.

Now we try and keep them in until they’re 16 (or is it 18 by now?), and you can’t! Without severe real threats, you cannot make sophisticated, physically-mature teens do what they don’t want. So schools have absentees, poor compliance with homework, and frustrated parents.

(2) Universities are failing, not because teachers are worse. They’re failing because the funders no longer want them.

A hundred years ago only 5% or so of students went to uni. They were very bright, got excellent education from “top cheps”, and went on to run the country and do vital research. And the tax-payers saw it as worth-while, a good investment in our future, at a modest price.

Now nearly half of students can go to uni. They’re around average intelligence. So lectures have to be fairly simple and slow. Graduates come out and work in stores. And the tax-payers don’t want to pay millions for the huge number of students, so grants are reduced, stipends fall, and we no longer have “top cheps” teaching. The blind teaching the blind, as it were.

Victoria is appalled that so many lecturers begin their course by saying how EASY this course will be, and you are GUARANTEED to pass, and I will spoon-feed you ALL the answers … What is the point?

School and university prolems both arise from the same source, and the solution is obvious. GK

Well, amazingly they’ve repaired my air-conditioner … and even more so, I don’t need it! I’ve got used to the heat, and the heat wave has passed (right down to 27.5C at dawn this morning). So I sit with my fan blowing right at me, in underwear, but very happy – with the minibuses tooting their way past and the SM yelling orders on the parade-ground across the road.

(About once a day a group of police recruits will march at a run out of the compound yelling “Left! Left! Left!” and fade gently into the distance.)

Unforch the mosquitoes have reappeared after the heat-wave. And I realized the foolishness of giving John my nice double-bed! When I sleep, my elbows touch the bug-net around my bed, and I wake up with bites all over my elbows. But Sue may have solved the problem. I’ve rammed two new shirts (you know how they’re pinned to flat cardboard?) under the bed, one each side, like the transept (?) in a cathedral. They hold the bug-netting out, away from my elbows. Worked last night, anyway. …And who needs shirts?

The well-remembered horror of putting milk on your cereal and having ants run out. Ugh. I’ve sprayed RAID all over the food shelf – should do wonders for my system…

Reality. John sent our whole class of 20 brand-new first-week nursing students up to the wards, to interview one patient each. They looked very uncertain – one girl came back to me at once saying “My patient can hardly talk”. But they stayed the whole 30 mins and more, and got really interested.

That girl met me in the lunch-bar next day with huge eyes and gasped out “My patient DIED!” He was a young man of 25. I’m glad he got to talk to a pretty nurse.

Life is hard here. One student in my group, when told the base of the skull is thick heavy bone, said “I held my father’s skull – it didn’t feel heavy.” Then he showed me the pictures. His father drove a taxi, disappeared last year, and was eventually found in a ditch as a skeleton, still wearing his clothes.

Yesterday we held a soiree for all John’s old students, JOSs, (now nurses). We sat on the roadside patio at Taju’s restaurant (Taju himself is a JOS, but has found a better way of making money), and bought ice-creams to all who came. All two of them. Hard to organize anything here.

One, staggeringly beautiful and intelligent, dared to question a doctor’s medical order here as a senior student – and was fired. With typical venom, the nursing school refused to release her transcript … so she had to retrain as a nurse all over again somewhere else.

It’s a good job God loves his children. They’re not very lovable. GK