A Day in the Life

 

Post by Lara

2 October 2012

Now that school has started, we are happy to have settled into a daily routine that isn’t as taxing as our 8am-5pm schedule during training, though it starts just as early.  Here’s a typical Salone Squared weekday:

2:00am: Wake up to the neighbors’ dogs and every other dog within hearing distance howling together. We don’t know why they do it, but it’s almost a nightly occurrence.  The howling usually lasts about 5-10 minutes, but occasionally it goes on much longer. On more than one occasion we’ve had to resort to our earplugs.  This never fails to remind me of the “twilight bark” scene of 101 Dalmatians.

6am: Alarm goes off. About 50% of the time I snooze it, which gives me ten more minutes to sleep before we need to get up and make breakfast.  If the temperature is below 75 degrees, we put on long sleeved shirts as soon as we get out of bed. It’s kind of sad, but we’ve definitely started adjusting to living in the tropics.

6:15am: Start up the kerosene stove to either make hot cereal or reheat last night’s dinner. Cereal options are oatmeal, bulgur wheat, and blended, a porridge made with corn flour.  PS- our food keeps just fine overnight unrefrigerated, but we have to be sure to heat it to steaming before eating it. We usually add a splash of water to keep it from burning to the bottom of the pan. We also make hot drinks from our 2.5 litre thermos [in Krio: flaks or “flask”] and greet all of our neighbors as they emerge one at a time from the other side of the duplex.

7:15am: Kevin leaves for school if he’s walking. If he’s taking his bicycle he leaves a bit later. It’s almost a mile to his school, and he is expected to greet just about everyone he passes along the way.

If it's raining, Kevin brings his work clothes in a waterproof bag and gets soaked on the way

7:40am: Lara leaves for school.  Since we live on Lara’s school grounds, this is a very quick walk downhill to the staff room to sign in.

Morning Assembly at CSS

7:45am: Morning assembly at both schools. Both are Christian schools, so assembly includes Christian songs and prayers. This is also the time when teachers or the principals give announcements. Assembly frequently runs over into 1^st period, which is a bit of a frustration.

8:00am: Classes begin. This term, we are teaching a combination of high school math, advanced high school math, and physics.  Our students are pretty typical high school students: larger classes are rowdier, the “science” students tend to be more serious about their studies, and classroom management requires a fair bit of creativity on our part. Unfortunately, our students are nearly all behind where they should be. It’s our goal to help those who are serious about their studies to catch up to where they should be by the time we leave.

Kevin teaching long multiplication

10:30am: Eat a sandwich that we made this morning. Options are usually homemade peanut butter and jam, nutella, or cinnamon sugar. Sometimes we have a hard-boiled egg, sardines, or homemade pickles.  When we’re not in class we are in the staff rooms of our respective schools, which are a bit different from typical American teachers’ lounges in that they tend to have students coming in and out throughout the day and sometimes teachers even choose to discipline their students in the staff room.  I’m interested to talk to the teachers and see how many of them would like the idea of a student-free staff room, which is generally taken for granted in American schools.

12:00pm: If it’s Thursday, Lara is done with class and goes to the market. Thursday is market day, so vendors come from all of the neighboring villages and even up the river from the large island 50 miles south of us. We’ll write a post about market day sometime soon- it’s quite the experience.

The store operated by Hawa, one of Lara's favorite vendors.  She is embarrassed to be photographed so she's hiding in the back.

2:00pm: School lets out. Lara walks a few hundred feet home and puts out our solar chargers, any laundry that didn’t dry the day before, and at least once a week our bedding- to let the sun keep any mold in check (one of the fine by-products of rainy season). Kevin often swings into town on his way home and picks up bread for the next day or any food items we need.  If it hasn’t rained in a day or two, we pump a few buckets full of water at the pump next to our house.

Everything gets line-dried here-- even Tiggers

3:00-6:00pm: At some point we start the coal pot for dinner. It takes about 2 hours to go from no fire to dinner on the table, depending on how fancy we feel like being [fried taquitos take longer, soup takes a lot less time].  We also put a pot of water on to boil and store that in our flaks so we can make coffee or tea, and also to heat our bath water later.  In this time we plan lessons and work on home-improvement projects such as painting our wash room or cleaning out one of our spare rooms to keep our new hen in at night.

Our coal pot with a pot of water on top

Saving leftovers in a thermos for the next day

5:00-7:30pm: Eat dinner. If it’s dark already, we eat by candlelight or by our radio’s LED reading light. Around this time our neighbors send over food to eat as well. It’s usually about a serving of rice and sauce. When we’re finished eating, we save 2 servings in a Tupperware container for morning, and feed all of our leftovers [plus things we don’t want such as fish heads and chicken bones] to the neighbors’ 3 dogs: Champion, Lucky, and Anobino [that last one is Krio for “I didn’t know”]. 

8:00pm: Mix up bath water and wash—sometimes with a bucket and a cup, other times with our camp shower, which is one of our favorite possessions, by the way.  The newly-painted washroom is lovely, and we’re just putting in some finishing touches before we move on to our next house project, painting our parlour (read: living room) floor.

The wash room

9:30pm: Brush teeth and go to bed. Sometimes watch a TV episode on our computer, or plan lessons, or read, or write in a journal before going to bed.