It is freezing cold. Most mornings I wake up to frost and
have to shower and have breakfast in the dark. I get to school at my normal
time and I sit in the dark for the first two hours. The kids come in from the
cold. I spend my first 30 minutes of the day telling kids to take their coats
and hats off. We trudge up to assembly breathing misty breaths and continue
breathing misty breaths in the cold, airless hall that we sit in waiting to
hear how bad all the kids are behaving and how we need to change.
“If not now then when, if not you then who?”
These are the two things I think about when I miss home. And
I’m so glad I have moved.
Christmas in Georgetown is full of new experiences and I’m
loving it. The music in the buses and blaring on the streets has changed to be
the normal music interspersed with Destiny’s Child version of ‘12 days of
Christmas’ every other song. This is just one of the things that twists
Christmas to the Caribbean compared to the UK. There is currently a Christmas
procession outside my house playing not “Santa Claus is coming to town” but “Soca
band is coming to town.”
This week has been a strange week at school. The past two
weeks have been just exams and this week is kind of a ‘dump-week’ on the end.
Lots of the kids know this so they have stopped coming to school. 50-70 of them
turn up each day, we do the regular assembly then make our way to the
classrooms. On Monday there was a sports afternoon then yesterday we had the ‘Miss
Nations Pageant’ in the evening.
America is arriving people! A few girls from my form group
were in the pageant hoping to be crowned queen. They had to compete in a few
different rounds- a talent piece, a cultural-dress, a fashion dress, evening
wear and an intelligence round. And also, a Facebook page where they competed
for likes to be crowned Miss Photogenic. I know; it is sickening. Watching it
turned out to be quite entertaining. The girls’ talents were amazing and it was
great to see them playing the piano, singing and playing the guitar when I’m
normally teaching them chemistry.
Today there was a Christmas Concert and another chance for
the students to display their musical talents and dance moves. Form 4 had
decided to be Crazy Scientists so I showed them how to do some explosive
experiments to wow the audience on stage. I’m so thankful that there are less
health and safety barriers in this country. I told the Principal about the
safety precautions I had and she laughed about how exciting it sounded. The
students went on to make brightly coloured solutions, blow up sodium chunks in
water, pull a cow heart out of their chests and set their arms alight with
methane bubbles. The audience loved it.
This evening I took minutes off my life by making a chicken
soup and adding too much ‘all-purpose seasoning.’
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