Cyclone Aila

Bangladesh and India have again been hit by a cyclone. This time she was named Aila. So far 130 people have been reported killed; I don't know whether this is in Bangladesh alone, or it includes the ones in India.
We had a bad storm, but the cyclonic weather never reaches this far north in the country. Here trees were uprooted and houses broken. Sonkar, the older brother of one of our students, reported that Omika couldn't come in because she had had to help recover bits of the house and work on rebuilding it again after the storm.
For the children the blessings come in the tradition that any fruit that has fallen on the ground may be collected by anybody regardless of where it fell. In this picture two of our students are using the time before the first class to gather mangos.
Like the students in this photo I had to use a towel in stead of an umbrella. A towel is hands-free and doesn't get broken like my umbrella did when the storm blew it inside out.

Infirmities, ailments and bugs

With a total of just over a hundred people, it is quite unusual that twenty people are absent due to illnesses, but that was the case at the school by the end of today. Mumps, fever, diarrhoea and runny noses have laid claim to a lot of us.
Will you pray for us today?
We have a centrally located whiteboard for messages to teachers, this is also where we write the names of children and teacher when they are absent. It started as a game that we chose different words meaning 'ill' for each person. I don't think that was the challenge that made me sick, but I do need to get to bed early tonight.

14 more

We have invited fourteen children to start in preschool in August. There were as many more on the waiting list, and that is without counting the ones who were too young, and the ones who were too old.
We have full grades up through grade four next year and I think it is fair to say that the school has entered a more established phase, a time with focus on how to improve quality and consolidate rather than build, but that is jumping ahead.
Next year our first two pupils are due to take their O Level exams from Cambridge International Examinations in England. There are still many challenges for us as we seek to develop our capacity to teach the higher grades.
The focus for the next couple of weeks are the exams in the second week of June. The children are studying harder than they have been; at least some are. We are looking forward to seeing evidence of our efforts this year. We see that all the time in children who read and write and get their numbers right, but there seems to be extra magic attached to the results of the timed work that some call exams.