Tuesday was my twenty third birthday and I arrived at school to find
six beautiful birthday cards from my six beautiful students. They had
peeled out all of the stickers from their exercise books to decorate
my cards with which, considering how much they treasure those
stickers, is a bit of an honour. They said that they couldn't afford a
cake so they'd brought in bananas (excellent) and four little fried
fish wrapped in newspaper (not quite so excellent). I think we need to
add 'vegetarian' to our vocab list.

I started the morning's lessons with a times tables tournament (my
favourite!) followed by fractions but, as a birthday treat, we spent
the afternoon sketching some of the amazing flowers that grow in the
school playground.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in Moshi gorging on ice cream and
chocolate cake with Lizzie, Naomi, Lian and Reema before everyone at
the hostel headed out to the amazing Sikh Union Club for a beer fueled
curry. Unfortunately some of us were rather more fueled than others
(Ollie) and I would like to thank the poor waitresses there for having
a sense of humour and not kicking a certain someone's bare behind out
the door! I arrived back at the hostel, and to my complete surprise,
was greeted with a proper Tanzanian birthday cake (three parts icing
to one part sponge) and card.

All in all a very happy birthday indeed.