Having discovered that a tropical climate suits me completely, I find myself living in sub-zero
temperatures, having to scrape ice off the car and wearing every available item of clothing. All of us wear at least two pairs of socks, Jordan sometimes wears three. That’s nine pairs of socks I have to wash a day!I still have the NZ Yahoo site as my homepage, and the temperature in the UK made their headline news last week. On Friday 7000 schools across the country were closed due to the weather.
Even whe
n I go to zumba dance classes and jump around for an hour, I’m still freezing cold.I have a little tray in the garden where I put nuts for the squirrels. This morning the nuts were frozen onto the tray and the poor squirrel was trying to wrest them off.
If you look at a world map when it is spilt into regions - the tropical region across the middle, the temperate regions either side of it, and the polar regions either side of them, then the UK is only just inside the temperate region. A few more metres and it would be in the polar region.
Aaaargh.
I’ve been to a couple of ‘African’ events recently.
My neighbour is involved with a charity in Kenya, Children of Watamu http://www.childrenofwatamu.net/, and Kira and I went along to one of their fundraising events. The charity started about 10 years ago when a woman from Blackpool went on holiday to Kenya, was impressed by the place but saddened by the lack of education for children there so went over and set up some schools and also an orphanage. She comes back regularly to the UK to raise funds for the work she is doing there. It was a great evening, and Kira came back with many prizes from the tombola stall.
Then my friend Jane, who is a primary teacher, has been doing a project on Africa with the children at school. She invited me to give a talk to the pupils (aged 8) about life in Uganda. It was interesting seeing the children’s reactions to some of the things I shared with them. At one point I showed them a photo of a small Ugandan house and explained that the mother would put a washing up bowl outside the front of the house and wash her children in it. I asked them what they thought she washed next in the bowl, expecting them to say “clothes” or “the dishes”. One little girl shouted out “her husband!”
I’d also explained that many Ugandans think that white people are very rich, so at the end of the talk one little boy came up to me and asked me my name. I said “It’s Mrs Chamberlain”.
He replied “I’m going to write in my book that Mrs Chamberlain is the richest person in Africa.”
So, Jordan and Kira are doing well in their respective schools. They both had parents' evenings recently and both got good feedback.
Kira was described as a ‘model pupil’, and is doing well academically.
Many of Jordan’s teachers think he’s wonderful (one teacher even thanked us for sending him to the school), and he is doing well too.
He got his school report on Friday, and Jon and I had to laugh at the physics teacher’s comments: ‘He shows an excellent knowledge of the subject and I enjoy his input in lessons even though they are not always about physics.’
His house at
school puts on a fundraising event every year to raise money for a local hospice. This year it was a MADD night (Music, Art, Dance, Drama) and in one sketch Jordan had to play the part of a female nurse, complete with false boobs.As you know, Jon has been the pantomime dame in the Jinja panto production for the last two years, and so was looking on very proudly.
“That’s my boy.”
We have been sorting out our many boxes of stuff that we need to sell, and Jon came across his old, very expensive and extremely sturdy briefcase.
Jordan - whose knowledge of science includes the fact that cockroaches can survive a nuclear reaction - looked at it and said “There are three things that will survive a nuclear bomb. Cockroaches, Ugandan cakes and Dad’s briefcase.”
Jordan has a girlfriend now, Lucie. She is a pupil at the same school and they have been together for a month. He phones her every day in the evening for about an hour, and they’ve been out on their first date to the cinema.
Kira’s school had a nice Advent celebration in church last week.
Mind you, I
was amazed that I had to pay £2 to go along and see it. I’ve never paid to go to church before!Schools these days are run like businesses and there are many things we have to pay for.
We also discovered that Kira will need to get glasses. She went to the optician this week and he said she is a bit short sighted, so we’ll start her off with glasses then will look at getting contact lenses a bit later.
Kira is having a poem published in a book! Children at various schools submit a poem and
the best ones are chosen to go into the book ‘One Upon a Rhyme’. Imagine being published at age 10!
Her poem was about an event that happened a few weeks ago.
There were posters around school asking ‘What is ‘It’?’ and then a huge nest appeared in the playground (about 3 metres square) with a big egg in the middle.
We went to a Sunday afternoon event to find out what ‘It’ was and discovered that it was this huge bird.
This is Kira’s poem:
‘It’ had a trick to lay an egg by its leg
‘It’ can fly in the sky
‘It’ can be on the run just for fun
‘It’ has no hair but ‘It’ likes to be in the air
That is ‘It’
When it is night don’t go near or ‘It’ might bite!
And so this year will be the first time all that all four of us will have been with our family
over Christmas.My sister has been getting into the Christmas spirit since October when she bought - yes - a Santa toilet seat cover complete with a little bell on his hat that rings.
How sad is THAT?
We had a housewarming party a couple of weeks ago and she bought us a housewarming gift.
Yes - a Santa toilet seat cover complete with a little bell on his hat that rings! .... this is terrible ….. people will think I’ve bought it!
Anyway it was very nice to have both my and Jon’s family together.
As the families live in different parts of the country, we haven’t all been together since our leaving do when we left the UK fifteen years ago!
I hope you enjoy your Christmas and New Year and we'll be blogging again in 2011.
K, J, K, J x
