Friday 2nd June 2006

Hello everyone,

Life here is fairly mundane at the mo, the temperature is rising steadily, last week it was around 44 celcius most days, and this week it’s been around 47 or 48 almost every day. The heat is completely draining and exhausting, and the air-con in our classroom is struggling to keep the temperature below 35, which is still a welcome 13 degree difference!

Playground duty is gruelling, but aside from that everything’s going well. We’ve had our exams, and now have two weeks left with basically nothing to teach them, as the syllabus if finished, so I’m just making stuff up (worksheets, wordsearches off the internet, and a random project on cars – next week we’re going to do a project on the world cup!).

Luckily, most of the governement schools have already broken up for the summer (the heat gets steadily worse so they break up as early as possible so everyone can go somewhere else for two months!) and it’s only the private schools that are still open, and as a lot of our kids have brothers and sisters in public schools, the parents just decide they can stay at home after exams.

My class of 16 unruly 8-year olds has gradually reduced, and on Wednesday only 4 of them showed up.

Which is nice.

Last Tuesday we took the primary kids to Aqua Park, which was totally awesome, and me and Tudor (a 55 year-old ex-headmaster) raced each other down the flumes for most of the day. Yay!

In other news, a rumour has got around that one of the teachers in SEN has a crush on me. The description of him that Michaela gave Bryn was (and I quote) “He’s about 40, going bald, pretty tubby with horrifically bad teeth. He fancies Maya because he thinks she looks innocent and naive. His name is Mohammed. Oh, and he likes porn with animals in because he grew up on a farm.”

Seriously, word for word.

Oooh I so can’t wait for him to make his move!

Sadly, as Bryn and I discovered when trying to spot him at the secondary graduation ceremony, there are literally about 7 guys called Mohammed who are going bald and have bad teeth! Not exactly a lot of talent out here.

Aside from that, not much is happening, although for some reason the heat here is making me swell up, and I have put on another 3 slobby kilos, (which I’m hoping like hell is water retention through dehydration, but I have my doubts)!!

I’m an enormous heifer at the mo, and may have to wear a red carnation at the airport so my dear family will recognise me, instead of craning there necks and saying “Where’s Maya?” “I dunno, I can’t see round this elephant coming through the arrivals door”, or something similar.

If you ever want to put your own weight into perspective, I can recommend this terrifying option – I realised yesterday that even if I lost 3 kilos, I would still weigh DOUBLE what Nicole Ritchie weighs!! She may be an anorexically thin celebrity waif, but nevertheless, I can fit TWO of her into my bodyweight, with 3 kilos of flab to spare.

Horrifying.

So, I’ll leave you with the terrifying question, How many Nicoles can you fit into your weight?

(Oh, and if I don’t come home in two weeks, it’s because I’ve decided I’m too fat to ever have sex again, except with bald Mohammed, and I’ve moved to a farm in the desert to live out his animal porn fantasies).

Lots of Love,

“Sheep have feelings too” Maya!