Preparing Lessons, Milking Cows and Dinner Duty!

For the past few days we have been mostly preparing lessons.  So we have been cooped up in the DST office with the friendly gekkos.  There is an open day at the school on Saturday so all the students and teachers are busy preparing for that.  It’s amazing how efficient they can be when there is a deadline-even the construction workers that are building the new finishing school appear to be on fast forward!  I am looking forward to it as we will get the opportunity to meet previous VA students. We are hoping to have brief interviews with them to see if we can identify any gaps in the school that we could try and fill.

I am currently preparing 2x lessons, one on maps and ‘plane table’ surveying-which I am embarrassed to admit took a lot of googleing for me to work out what it was all about! Basically its just a table on a tripod and there is an alidade which you look through and draw a parallel line on.  Then you measure the distance of the point from the tripod and mark that on the drawing to scale. I know-it’s so simple-it was beyond me!  And the second lesson is on leveling.  I’m looking forward to these lessons and will hopefully get a play with the equipment tomorrow.

Students making a rain gauge

In my last lesson (which took closer to 3 hours rather than the 50 mins expected!) I taught about the weather and weather instruments.  I gave the students material to make specific instruments and let them design them themselves.  This was a fun activity as it got them thinking and scavenging the campus for further materials.  We then used the instruments to calculate wind speed and direction.  I was caught out with conversions, it took approximately 25min for the students to convert m/hr into km/hr. I will try and make this more clear next time.

My class with their weather instruments

We had a stroll into Pabal the other evening to go and see a grave of Mastani, a Muslim wife of a popular Maharasta king.  It was very beautiful but pretty run down as the government don’t appear to look after their historic monuments. 

Pabal is a funny village, its roads are made from mud which gets pretty filthy when it rains.  The buildings are random, with some made of concrete, some with corrugated iron and some with wood.  There are also pigs running around everywhere.  We think they are lovely but the locals believe they are dirty as they eat all the rubbish-its just as well though as otherwise the town would smell of rotting food.  We thought someone owned them but they are wild. 

Me attempting to milk an angry cow

On campus we have quite an array of wildlife also. There are loads of squirrels which are so cute and mischievous.  We get little birds flying into our room and we even have an old nest inside.  There is a huge family of rooks that sleep in the tree outside our room and the make such a horrible gargling racket! Very eerie! There are also lots of gekkos and some big lizards that help clear away some of the pesky flies and mozzies.  And the school stray dogs that bark away at night and the occasional rat that runs above us in the kitchen.  We’ve been told that there are snakes as well but I’ve been trying not to think about that! J  As well as the wildlife we have goats, chicks and cows on campus.  I held a chick a few days ago and already it has grown so big! They will get sold at the market in a few weeks.  The goats are great-we feed them our apple peelings every day and they get very excited!  I also finally plucked up the courage to milk a cow the other day. I was a bit rubbish at it but I was told that the cow was angry and not giving much milk so it was not just my technique.  I need to get up early to milk the friendly productive cow in the morning one day.

One of our dinner ladies preparing rice

I’m on ‘Dinner Duty’ this week (or maybe 2 weeks-I’m not sure!) it means that I’ve got to help set up dinner for the students with some other students.  I’m not very good at it though as I can’t seem to put cups down in a straight line! Then after dinner (which I need to wolf down which I find difficult) I check the other student’s plates that they have cleaned.  It’s funny as all of us on duty I’m sure secretly enjoy the power of turning people back for having a spot of soap on a plate.  I only do it as that’s what has happened to me in the past few weeks!