You’re down to your last jar of Vegemite. No one’s undies have any elastic left in them. You start checking expiry dates on drivers’ licenses and car insurance, and renewing them even though they have 5 months left. You’re thinking about where you’ll store the washing machine for 6 months, […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
This was a new kind of story I tried with our Elliot on the way to school one morning. I stopped at various points and asked him to make a decision and made up the next part of the story based on that. Once upon a time, there was a […]
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
“Maybe we should just go home next year,” Arthur said to me. It was a question of how we can best use our resources. The money we raise for our family’s living expenses is maybe 90% of the entire national staff budget for TAFES. Nationally, there are about 20 staff. […]
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
I learned a new word the other day: bi-dialectical. We’d been watching a show with Gillian Anderson in it, and wondering at why her British accent is so good. Turns out, because she lived between the US and the UK as a child, she has two accents in the same […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Today is 6 years since we arrived in Tanzania. We are often asked if we enjoy living here, but it’s not that simple. I find myself echoing the words of ‘For Good’ from the musical Wicked: Like a comet pulled from orbit As it passes a sun Like a stream […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
I’ve always been a good sleeper. I was even one of those miracle babies whose parents hit the genetic jackpot of offspring who sleep through the night at 6 weeks. As an adult, I fall asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, and my superpower is the […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
With my current lack of brain power, I expected my Swahili would take a hit, that the sluggishness I feel in English would mean remedial Swahili. Yet, the opposite has been true. I am unable to focus in English. (Posts like these ones which posted recently were written before Red […]
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes