Tala

This is my first entry from my new home: Holy Rosary College, Tala. Its Monday today, my first day at college. Assembly was at 7.45, under a tree in the compound gardens, and I was formally introduced to the girls (turns out HRC is a girls-only college, this information didn’t reach me until last week during my in-country training, as VSO in london never sent me part B of my placement description). Since then I have :-

• helped fix a problem with the network
• helped one of the staff to update the college intranet (set up by my predecessor)
• bumed my head on the staff-room door twice! (have put up the bright pink post-it with mind your head on it that was given to me by Amber Cadman before I left)

As you can guess, there is muc to tell already from my first week or so in Kenya, that will have to take its time. I seem to have plenty of it too. I have been mostly on my own this weekend, having come from Nairobi to Tala with Sister Pauline on Saturday. We arrived at lunch time and I had lunch with the sisters before unpacking my bags and trying to make myself at home. So far I have managed to achieve:

• Cooked some pasta and veg
• Washed and dried some clothes
• Walked into and around the village of Tala, 1.5km away, while it was quiet on Sunday
• Set up my radio (I bought a big on with phono inputs so I can plat the MP3 Diskman through it) and listened to an episode of The history of psychodelic music that Chris gave me, amongst other spoken-word things, on an MP3 CD; I couldnt find the World Service and was getting itchy for some English

(I’m in a list sort of mood, for some reason)

So now Im sitting at the Linux server in the computer lab at the college. And there is over a week’s worth of spam to delete in the other window so I will get on with that and reply to those of your who have mailed me since I left.