Here we go again.

School's back. Again. The yearly rush of pupils who have been hanging around the school doors for a good week now, staying outside all day and convincing their parents that classes had already started up, thereby getting out of working in the fields and cooking lunch. Kids who've moved on to the next school up shouting hellos in the street or popping up in the supermarket. The blank looks when the teachers ask the students to take a pen and paper, somehow imagining that said students might actually have their stuff this year, especially at the beginning. And the new colleagues who don't know their way around yet and who insist on telling everyone that that's the way they did it in their old school in mainland France, there's no reason why it shouldn't work here. 

The school has had a few problems over the holidays... especially the computer room, where we had installed fifteen or so brand new computers last April or May. We now have zero brand new computers. Zero computers total, actually. Not the best way to start the year. The school gets broken into pretty much every holiday, though, when it's not the weekends. When they installed the computers in the computer room, they also installed computers in the school library, a fairly secure room with reinforced doors and windows. The computers disappeared. They installed some more. Those disappeared too. A total of 14 break-ins in about three weeks, and a total loss of about forty computers. On the bright side, I suppose that now at least some of the kids in Kawéni have a computer at home.

This year, there are 1525 pupils in my school. 87 teachers in total, of whom 51 are new to Mayotte. 4 discipline people, two of whom used to be supervisors and all four of whom are women, will be around to help us get things done properly. Lessons start at 7.15 and finish at 5.15, except on Wednesdays when they finish at 1.25 and Saturdays when they finish at 11.10. I'm the main teacher for a group of 14-year-olds who have been - in theory - carefully selected for their motivation to learn English. Instead of having three hours of English per week, this group and the 15-year-olds above them have five hours a week. I'm supposed to go into more depth when teaching them the language, but also to tell them more about England and English culture. The oldest kid in my class is 15, the youngest is 12. None of them are over five feet tall, which came as a bit of a surprise compared to last year's strapping six-footers.

We started off with introductions: my name is, I am X years old, etc. They asked me questions, and I introduced myself. "My name is Miss Cooper. I come from England", I said. Just to make it clearer: "My nationality is English". A lot of muttering and whispering ensued, with a few exclamations of surprise. They've been taught about England and English people for the last two or three years, but they'd never actually seen one before. As far as they were concerned, English people were about as real as hobbits or elves. So it came as a bit of a surprise to have a real one standing up in front of them. You could almost see them wondering if I would bite or if they could throw me peanuts.