Not much new

I don't really have a single story to tell so I think I'll just give a few short blurbs.

I harvested the potatoes. It was the most pathetic harvest in the history of potato farming. Aggie said we may have planted more potatoes than we harvested, but she was impressed that the potatoes were so deep in the earth. That's what you get when everyone tells you to plant during the dry season or else the potatoes will be flooded. Then they ask why you planted so early and now have to carry buckets of water up a mountain every day. Then you have another job to do (teaching) so some days you don't carry water at all and the potatoes are stunted. Anyway, now I have space to begin my adventures with corn. I think the soil might be too acidic so I'm going to grind up chalk stubs and use the dust (calcium carbonate) as a liming material to raise pH and supply calcium. Chemistry!

I fasted for 20 of the 30 days of Ramadan. I started late; I was on two when all the devout were on 12. My first four days I would tell people how long I had fasted and they would scoff. On the fifth day everyone, and I mean everyone, was incredibly surprised and told me I had done spectacularly well and I would surely go to heaven and see Allah. Five days and 180 degrees of opinion. The whole thing was an exercise in being weird, however. No one could begin to understand that I would fast to feel closer to my students and not because I had to. All the Muslim students (that's most of them) have redoubled their efforts to convert me.

Aggie's mother called me "yule jamaa", which means "that guy", instead of "yule mzungu", which means "that white foreigner". I felt good.

My students were moving logs in the valley and complaining about it. At one point they stopped working entirely and the prefects came to me to say "They don't want to work". I replied "Neither do I" and started reading a magazine. The job didn't get done that day, but I felt better.

Final exams are upon us. My form four students have completely finished their exams and forms one, two, and three start in the middle of next week (the 31st). That means I have one week to finish forms one and three (form two is done and I'm very proud of myself). Every time I tell a class that we finished the syllabus three things happen:
1) they clap and are incredibly excited (it is not common to finish)
2) they ask to be drilled on questions from previous national exams
3) they ask if I'll start teaching them biology, physics, and mathematics
My three responses are always
1) clapping and congratulating the students
2) telling them I have no problem helping them with old exam questions
3) telling them that I can't plan lessons for all of the science classes in the school, but if they have old exam questions I'll try to help them.
I feel bad not being able to help, but one science teacher cannot teach 88 periods of science and math in a 40 period week.