Back To School

I wasn’t kidding when I said Joan’s preschool teachers make activities out of household garbage. With school starting this week we packed the kombie and went around making deliveries. Every school gets the typical things like crayons, paint, rulers, staplers, etc, and also two boxes of trash. With the contents they’ll come up with all sorts of creative activities. It was cool to revisit many of the schools and even see a few I hadn’t been to yet. (Lisa – Vicki sends her greetings.)

Saying ‘school starts’ is a very generous way of putting it. Basically kids slowly start filtering back in and by February the little shacks and schoolrooms will be packed. Some suggest this is because people don’t want to pay school fees for the month of January since it’s only two weeks. I’m sure the kids aren’t complaining.

There’s a Canadian team coming over in July who raised a bunch of money to install toilets at some of the preschools that have none. We visited the manufacturer and he explained to us all about the dry system they use. They install two wells underground, each with a hole up to a corner of the room, one is capped, the other has the toilet on it. When that well is full you simply switch the toilet to the other corner. In about a years time the first well is completely dry. It’s quite a fascinating system considering water is so scarce and expensive and in most of these places plumbing is not an option. So now for only about US$750 a preschool that’s been using a metal ring and a paint bucket can have a permanent, freestanding, perfectly sanitary toilet that they’ll never have to pay to flush.