Monday afternoon and it is chucking it down. We could see the rain coming when we were cycling back up the hill after lunch. Fantastic black skies, with the Rift Valley mountains obscured.

Today seemed to be the first day of term here, there were some schools open at the end of last week but loads more kids around today, all clutching stacks of new exercise books and some wearing new uniforms. All seems quite different to a new term at home. All instructors were meant to report back to college today and there was supposed to be a big meeting about the changes in the college structure but now enough people came so the meeting will happen some other time. Can you imagine?! I mean, either you are supposed to report back or you aren’t…. Obviously there are problems with the system. Instead today the management have interviewed 16 potential new staff for the degree programme – they needed to increase the number of instructors with masters degrees.

We don’t have much to do right now. We have two more weeks with no HDP classes and we have caught up with marking now so I am searching for employment. Theres are loads of things I could be doing but they are only useful if the college think they are. I am quite frustrated in this role really – I’d love to be more involved in the management of the college instead of being confined to the Higher Diploma programme. Oh well, only a couple of months to go here. Mind you I don’t know if things will be any better in the new placement.

I was thinking the other day – as I was doing the usual ten minute hurtle down the rutted track on my bike at breakneck speed, hoping there was enough life left in my brakes to stop me in case some unsuspecting pedestrian stepped out in front of me or I got too close to a gari driver’s whip - I was thinking of the London Underground. Well, particularly of Ange and that daily journey home on tube, train and foot. I hope, Ange, that the journey has improved (unlikely) or that you will be plotting some way to escape it – even if that is only the next holiday. Mid September, what signs are there of Autumn – definitely my favourite season.

There was an article in the Guardian weekly where someone was suggesting paying £500 for students who get A’s in their maths A Levels. I’m all for promoting maths but surely there is another way?

We are hoping to go to the Bale mountains next week and I asked a couple of colleagues if they wanted to come – since we are paying for guides anyway I figured we may as well make good use of them. Anyhow, they looked at me as if I was mad. People don’t have holidays here in the way we do – if there is time off work then mostly people go and visit their families and that is it. The only time people have travelled outside their own area is when they have been assigned to college or university in some far flung part of the country (part of a deliberate policy to spread students from the same ethnic groups out to minimise potential conflict) or on a rare field trip. Can you imagine that – you people who are off to exotic destinations at the mere sniff of a school holiday?

Rain has stopped. Mostly it is heavy but short lived here – not like the drizzle that can cloak parts of the UK for days at a time! Better find some work to do.