Cycling in the Clwydian hills will improve the lot of children at Brutu Kindergarten!

Some great news this week is that one of our friends at home , Dave Bullock, and his students at Frodsham High School has raised several hundred pounds to assist with our efforts to support the Kindergarten Schools in Lawra District. We are absolutely delighted and we shall certainly put it to good use – for toys, books, class-room improvements etc. Thanks for the sweat and toil on your bike around the hills of North Wales to raise this sum Dave; thanks go to you and all your friends who had their arms twisted to support you!! We will keep you posted, via the Blog, on the use of the funds - our next step will be to meet with the PTA and Rev Sr Justina, (who is the Assistant Director in charge of school supervision and who has a keen interest in this particular school) and work out their immediate priorities. They will be overjoyed.

Our VSO work with Lawra’s Education Service continues to evolve, with us both engaging in a range of sometimes quite unpredictable spheres of work; it is never boring! We keep the Teachers’ Resource Centre ticking over financially by doing photocopying, laminating and document binding with a constant stream of teachers wanting study leave forms, applying for study leave, going away and then not coming back to the Upper West - a constant ‘brain drain’. The Ghana Education Service, in the name of technological advancement has decreed that all 44 Junior High Schools should enter their examination students ‘ data online by December. The fact that none of the 44 schools in the Lawra District have electricity, computers or the Internet and only one teacher has his own computer wasn’t taken into consideration. So, over the next two weeks the TRC is helping the JHS Year 3 teachers to enter their pupils’ exam details onto a special database installed onto the four available computers at the TRC as well as going out to schools (with our own cameras) to take digital pictures of the students because schools don’t have cameras!!

Exploring at week-end helps to compensate for the limited scope for mid-week leisure activities. We have no hills, tennis courts, swimming pools, Operatic Society or the like, no TV, nowhere to go out for a meal, no cinema etc.. but there is an abundance of local bars if you want to drink yourself into a stupor at the end of the working day. We have decided that weekends are definitely to be used and enjoyed and so we are off to Burkina Faso again, this time to Bobo Dioulasso , to explore. We believe it is much greener and fertile than around the capital of Ouagadougu and that there are hills, waterfalls and escarpments to the South heading towards Banfora and Sindou. We get by reasonably well with Nigel’s French.

On the home front, the garden beats us and Harmattan season is upon us!I have completely given up with the garden. We will now have no rain until March at the earliest and I can’t be bothered to lug water to a garden where everything gets eaten by crickets, grasshoppers and caterpillars. Also I feel guilty using water which has to be brought to our house on the head of a woman who has 7 children of her own and works incredibly hard just to make ends meet. The weather is getting hotter during the day and colder at night, from now until December; this last week it has been around 35 – 40 deg day and down to about 15 -18 deg night time.

What a country of contrasts this is.

Bye all