Lunchtime in a town primary school. Children are a wonderful way to take the temperature of a place. I had a meeting with the senior staff booked for 2 o'clock so I decided I would arrive early with the camera and see what the lunch break was like. One can often learn about a school more quickly when it is in informal mode. The school is down a deep descent off the highway. As one approaches it one gets a birds eye view and realizes how big it is for a primary school, over 1100 pupils. Some of the older learners are out in the school grounds preparing soil for planting, clearing weeds and clearing drainage ditches. They have long handled spades and bush knives in hand. They spy me from a long distance. A sharp reminder of how conspicuous we are as white people. They soon realize I am training my camera on them and they all drop what they are doing to wave, shouting to include them in the picture. The deep ditches marking the boundary of small cultivated squares are essential on such steep slopes if the plants are not to be washed away.

I pick my way through a hole in the fence beside the teachers' gardens. Children over the world have carved themselves shortcuts into and out of school. I was glad to make use of it saving myself a quarter of a mile in baking heat. As I picked my way gingerly down the slippery slope into heart of the school the schoolteachers' wives stepped onto the verandah to greet me. The school has received some impressive new classrooms on posts from Australian Aid. The older children were housed in these. Unfortunately both teachers' houses and new classrooms are in danger following landslips from the road above. The head was keen to elicit my support in making representations to the works department for the road to be shored up. The school is next to a notorious sharp bend in the highway. Last year a secondary school bus had come off the road there, descending to the river below with one child dying and many injured. Periodically a container lorry will turn over. These are impressive beasts. The locals have a well-worked routine reminiscent of Cornish wreckers of old, or perhaps more recently the Branscombe free loaders. I am told they descend with rapidity protecting the wreck and swiftly torch open the containers, the contents never to be seen again, at least not by the transport company.

The muddy ground surrounded by classrooms is seething with playing children. To one side some of the older girls are skipping. Boys playing the local sporting passion, rugby league, dominate the main part of the ground. The rules or even the sides were difficult to ascertain but it was all good-natured. Outside the rather dilapidated Grades 3 and 4 classrooms there were several squads of pupils going through the well worn routine of furniture shifters world wide with a pigeon version of: to me, to you, to me, as they were failing to get their angles right after having spent their lunch time building new benches for their classrooms. The children bring their own lunch. One feels for them, as the school is reliant on the town mains water supply. But this is turned off between 9 in the morning and 6 in the evening. The consequent hygiene problems are obvious especially when the children use the deep drop toilets. Teachers told me that the children are encouraged to bring their own toilet tissue. As I turned to ascend the stairs to go to the staff room a band of bare footed approximately 9-year-old boys and girls ran past waving bush knives with their two-foot blades. Not in anger, just in youthful exuberance. They had been on grass cutting duties. I thought of Judith Douglas, the excellent deputy at St Leonard's Primary and how she was concerned that infants might hurt themselves playing on a hummock by the playground and of the volcanic parent who wanted to sue the school when her child slipped and cut his knee on a partially buried piece of metal running where he had been told explicitly told not to go. Different places, different

cultures.

While Geoff was on a town school visit Heather had set off for a rural elementary (infant) school with the other VSO primary education volunteer up here, also called Jeff, very confusing! From the top of our road about a 10 minute climb, it took another 45 mins travelling along a very muddy, steep up and down track crossing a couple of streams on slippery stepping stones, thank goodness for goretex walking shoes! As elementary schools only operate in the morning we had expected to find the three teachers and an empty school. But no, most of the children were still there with several members of the community, so we decided the best way was to just get on and teach the lessons we had expected to be going through with the teachers. The children and the men present joined in with gusto, the teachers watched and the ladies went into the other 'classroom' to prepare refreshments. Two hours later we all had a well earned rest and ate the tea laid out for us, fried egg, tomato and banana sandwiches (a rather remarkable combination) followed by slices of pineapple and papaya. We then trudged back the way we had come with a large group of children some of whom lived almost at the beginning of the track. Imagine being an infant doing that walk before and after school every day mostly with bare feet.