forgotten post from mid-February

Malihai is going well. We had a 2 part lecture on seed collection and storage. During my talk I was getting blank stares for a while, until I compared choosing healthy mother trees with choosing healthy breeding cattle, and the teacher/interpreter compared drying the seeds well before storing with drying corn for storage. We brought it to the village level for that one.

Results from secondary school exams were bad. Out of 41 kids, I think 16 passed. Most of them, while technically passing, still didn't score high enough to even get into teachers' college. And this year there are no science teachers at all, so I doubt the next group will do any better.

My new girls program co-teacher was a flake these weeks. Missed the entire first week and half of the second. Since I can't teach it alone, that means the program wasn't even started. I had a talk with her and she promised to come. The next class, she called saying she wasn't coming; she was afraid to walk in the rain. It had been lightly sprinkling for about 10 seconds. By the time I called her back, it had stopped completely and I told her she needed to come. She showed, and we had a great session. Or, she did, because I didn't really say anything. The first class is always the hardest. The girls aren't used too us or talking much in class. It takes a few weeks to get them to quit mumbling their answers to the floor. Then we went to get a soda and talk about the next session. Hopefully we're on track now. (Update Feb26, no, we are not. She never showed again.)

The mission is repeating the soap project, but with a new group since the women didn't want to do it again, even though it made a decent profit. They want me there to supervise, so it'll be when I get back.

I think the headteacher has made it his mission to torture me in ways that I can't rat him out for. His newest thing is saying the students aren't allowed to carry my water anymore, and that his kids will do it. Except that they don't, and when they do, its nasty village well water and not the nice mission water I was used to. And I spend an awful lot of time without any water to wash or cook with. The other day I just asked a different teacher to have the kids bring me water and I got it, so I'll just go around the headmaster from now on.