Wow, what a week! My first whole school week here in Ejura... This week I;

• Melted! The heat here is intense, turns out when I came it was suprisingly not to hot but now the humidity has arrived. Not that a nice red face and scarecrow like hair isn’t attractive...
• Learnt to wash clothes – bucket style! (my white shirts still came out brown... but the smelt clean!)
• Taught my first class – english... was very tough as some of them are fine but others spell ‘orange’ starting with any letter they think of – ‘b’ was strangely popular...
• Learnt to appreciate the luxury of water – I had my first normal (although cold) shower yesterday after days of good ole bucket showers...
• Practiced my very limited Twi – I can now say ‘how are you’ ‘i am fine, and you?’ and ‘thankyou’ ... a small but useful start.
• Was sick and got paranoid that I had malaria – read my ‘healthy africa’ book (thanks alice!) over again to reassure myself only to find that I could also have dengue fever, typhoid etc etc.
• Bought material and had a skirt made – was very nervous of the outcome as the seamstress spoke very little english. It turned out quite well though!
• Learnt not to play football (I’m converting from soccer for a more universal effect) in jandals. Must remember "the kids can but I can’t". I fully bailed in my jandies, was bowled over by a swarm of my P1 phys ed class and now have 2 very unattractive knees which no plasters will agree to stick to – so hello african dust in the wounds!
• Learnt to love the weekends – school is exhausting!
• Visited monkeys at the Baobeng-Fienna Monkey Snactuary – very short tour (aparently 1 hour but 5 volunteers would tell you that it was 20mins at the most!). They were quite cute until one almost peed on our group and 2 others made in indecently obviously (about half a metre in front of us) that it was mating season!
• Got so coated in dirt, sweat and dust (mmmm) that it looked like i had a very orange, very streaky and very sticky looking tan! The windows of the shared taxi and tro tro were wound down for the dust to fly at me while i was innocently enjoying the breeze. (i looked so much like a homeless person that the other vols, quite orange themselves, took photos of me!)

Am settling in well though, it finally feels like ‘home’ here and I no longer find it weird to wake up at 5 to the boys chanting and beating the drum (their morning Ananda Marga worship type thing)... I do miss parts of NZ – the sea, hot showers, black forest chocolate, the cleanliness of the toilets, ice cream, drinking water from the tap, pasta, the greenness (the stupid orange dust is still everywhere) but mainly the people!