"The end of the world is coming"

Today we took a later start, but attempts to sit outside the hotel and top up the tan were confounded by the lack of breeze/insane heat.  We set off to find some government schools in the slum area of Kasoa, as we had previously seen one near to Omega 94.  After a JT-esque stroll through the slum in the heat we stumbled upon the government school (thanks to a Junior High student from 94 who was off school sick and offered to take us).  We met with the friendly headmistress who agreed for us to return the next day to do our research, but in return we had to sit through a lengthy lecture about religion, all the time agreeing wholly that we were Christian and had bibles- our plans were thwarted however when she gave us a verse of the bible to read before our return the next day- eeech.  She believed that the end of the world was coming, and this was indicated by Japan's earthquake and tsunami, and the fighting in Northern Africa/the Middle East- a bold statement.

We also managed to fit in some chat about private and government schools, and it was her belief that once the students got to senior secondary school the private school students would be ahead for the first term, but that after this the government students would overtake them and maintain the lead through to the end.  Surprisingly, there was another government school right next to this one, and she directed us there for research purposes.  Why there is a need for two schools operating at the same levels in the same place I am unsure, surely locating them separately would mean serving a wider proportion of the local community! We found the Head-teachers office, complete with sleeping Head-teacher (very Beautiful Tree) but once awakened he kindly directed us straight to the staff room to conduct our interviews.  Sixteen students later we were ready to leave, particularly because one of the teachers kept repeating what we were asking the children very loudly to them to instigate a response, even though most of the time they had already answered in a normal volume.  Her presence also made me suspicious that the children were not answering entirely honestly.

To round off the day we headed to Omega 94 to assist with Sophie's Phonics training, which went down very well with the teachers, and should hopefully be a wide improvement on their current methods of teaching children to read, which generally involves rote learning of passages of text, and doesn't seem to be greatly effective.  The fact that Ken and Andrew are so keen to implement the phonics method also provides another example of their high levels of innovation and efforts to improve.  After training we were acquainted with Ken's son, Nevis (not sure on the spelling), who although shy at first did enjoy my chasing him round the playground/office for a marker pen! On our way out of school Ken also informed us that lovely Lisa, who works in the office at 94 is his wife, she is expecting another baby as well, which made this much more exciting!