We've settled into a routine here and it goes a little like this...We get woken up at 5am by the mosque, the cockerels and our diligent host who brings our breakfast into our dining room. We fall back asleep and wake again about 7.30am when we get up and boil some water which we put into a big basin and then scoop out with a jug and pour over ourselves, individually of course!

Then we eat our beakfast which is avocado, two mandazi (fried squares of doughnut type stuff) which we smother in honey and eat alongside a banana and a hard boiled egg. Then we sit around for a while before beginning the half hour trek down the dusty red road to our office.

We get there and sit down and have a chat, then we go out to visit women who have been given grants by previous volunteers. If it's Monday or Thursday we go to the market to see them in situ otherwise we go to their houses. Here we collect their profit and loss or do a stock check, counting out fish, tea, tomatoes or whatever else they are selling. Often they give us a cup of tea infused with fresh ginger or cinnamon and if it's lunch time the women are kind enough to share their lunch, it's polite to accept and seen as an honour to both giver and recipient.

Then we go back to the office and shut up for lunch. Then we open up and write up reports or teach the secretary how to use excel as a means to help her develop an easy way to get the numbers to the charity in the UK, something they haven't done before meaning the numbers aren't collected regularly.

We finish up and walk back up our hill to the house where we collapse all hot and sweaty and drink a cup of tea. Soon we see little heads bobbing up and down outside of our window and when a threshold is reached the calls of 'Teacha, Teacha' ring out and we go to meet the throng and lead them into a house next door which has become an out of school classroom.

We take the kids, aged 4 to 14 for the next hour and a half playing bingo or snakes and ladders to help teach numbers. We play memory games and sometimes let them just do some drawing, colouring in or do something bigger like making paper planes followed by a competition. So far the paper crowns and masks have been the biggest hit…

It begins to get dark and we turf the kids out and they hang around for a while to let the excitement die down, if it isn't dark we play a game of pirates (where the kids have to steal a set of keys from the feet of a blindfolded 'pirate') or heads down thumbs up. Both games get them to be quiet for a while.

Finally we get into our house and dinner arrives - a combination of beans or meat stew or pilau (rice and cumin mixed through with meat) and a carbohydrate of rice, chapattis or mash. This is followed by an orange for dessert and then we go through to our lounge and read or write or watch programs on the computer.

At about 10 ish we collapse into bed and do some more reading then pass out.

At the weekends we usually jump on a bus to a city, Moshi or Arusha and eat something different, have a beer or go out with other volunteers if they're around. We buy supplies and head home for the start of another week…