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Monday Jul 16, 2007

The play is over!

It's strange how soon I'm going to be back in England; before I left a year sounded like a long time but it's gone ridiculously fast. Probably because I've been doing so much, but it just seems weird that in less than a month I'll be back in the frozen north – or flooded north, as I hear.

Work has been mad recently. Bozena was away when we were finishing the last edition of the paper, and after she left various complications appeared, the day before we had to go to print. This resulted in me staying up working on it til 3 in the morning when I had to be up at 6 to go and teach. The next morning I was rushing to get out of the house, being loudly exasperated at the blocked toilet and hunting around for any hair grip as I appeared to have lost them all, and I managed to snap my toothbrush in half. I sighed, "Come on. I know I'm having one of those days, but HOW do you snap a toothbrush?" Oddly enough, I later found my hair grips – I'd put them all in a bag to be organised (so that I wouldn't always lose them, haha) which had somehow then fallen down the toilet, thus blocking it. Don't you love it when these little things all join up together.

We've just finished with the primary school play, which has given me a newfound respect for all my teachers who ever organised that kind of thing when I was little. Marcel went to pick up his sister Claudia, who's coming to visit, last Tuesday. He was meant to be back to help out on Friday, but then rang on Wednesday saying he was too ill to make it home. I find it REMARKABLY convenient that he fell ill while staying in the capital in a backpackers with a pool... Not that I'm implying anything...

But anyway, there was so much to do in so little time on Friday that it was quite funny. In the morning a shriek from the kitchen announced that troops of our ever-intrepid ants had made it into the fridge. Bozena has a black belt in kickboxing, is unfazed by things like bungee jumping and skydiving, but for some reason has an intense fear of ants. Other bugs she's fine with. It's inexplicable, to be honest. So I put a stop to the ant's polar expedition before we began running to and from school with props and whatever This was made all the more interesting by our broken gate. It jammed a while ago and a friend tried to open it, then came climbing over the fence sadly announcing, "I used a bit many power..." When we managed to get it open we saw that he'd snapped the outside handle clean off. So now if it blows shut when you're outside there's no way to open it.

 On Friday, I came home to find myself locked out with no one to come and open it for me. A street kid was sat in the road playing with a bit of scrap metal, and looked completely baffled at this mad white woman as I swore and kicked the gate, threw all my bags on the floor and scaled the fence. As I came down the other side I heard ripping noise behind, and slowly realised that my mended jeans were no longer mended, and my underwear was a lot more visible than I would have liked.

We got a local hotel to give us their function room for free for the play, and we pretty much had everything sorted by the time the kids got there that evening. There's one kid who's the coolest thing ever, he's 6, Congolese, and has an afro that adds about a foot to his height. He turned up in his own clothes, and when I asked, "Johnny, chick, where's your uniform?" He looked up at me with his huge eyes beneath this mad nest of hair, grinned and went, "It's at home." "Why is it at home?" *pause* "I left it there." "But you have to wear it for the start of the concert!" "The what?" "The concert! The play!" *pause* "What?"

Oh dear god, I would never have enough patience to be a teacher for the rest of my life. Even so, the kids were great and I couldn't help feeling a glow of pride that the hours of rehearsing and hair-tearing were paying off as the audience were genuinely amused by each sketch, rather than just sitting bored as a duty to their own kid. I did a quick thankyou speech at the end, and just when I was about to go offstage the kids swarmed on and mobbed me. I disappeared under an avalanche of hugs, and it took me a minute to realise they were all thrusting goodbye and thankyou cards they'd made themselves into my hands. When I emerged I was completely coated in the charcoal and cocoa we'd used for chimney sweep soot in the absence of face paint. But still, it was sweet. I'll miss my kids.

Anyway, I've rambled more than long enough, so I'll sign off for now.

Posted by Lucy Hayes ( 9:45 PM )
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