Day from Hell

20 years ago I worked in Sierra Leone in West African in a school for the deaf - St Josepeh's School for the Hearing Impaired. I stayed for two and a half amazing years. Leaving was very hard, I had made so many friends. I remeber in my last week watching the tanks rolling in off the ships at the docks. The war from Liberia had started to cross the border in the South and was spreading.

The war lasted 10 bloody years. Unspeakable crimes on women and children took place and I returned two years ago to witness the distruction.

There is relative peace there now and the government has recognised that education is one of the keys to future stability. Primary schooling is now free, but there arent enough funds to invest in equipment and teachers plus. Classrooms are overcrowded and teaching methods old fashioned and ineffective. Many of the pupils have special needs, especially as a result of the war, but there is no training for teachers to help them understand how to teach pupils with special needs. Despite this they're putting in legislation to ensure it is covered in the sylabus.

Umu Turay is now the head teacher of my old school and a lecturer at the Univesity in Makeni. In January 2009 she returned to Birmingham University (where she did her first degree) to do a Masters in SEN with the aim of returning to Sierra Leone to develop a sylabus for training SEN teachers. She's almost 60 and a grandmother. The course started in Sept 2008 but Britain wouldnt give her a visa and so she missed the first few months of the course and had to dive straight in at the deep end to catch up. This was hard. She wasnt used to electrity and computers and the subjects she was writing about were very emotive so I helped. I've never known anyone to work so hard (or worked so hard myself). In the past 14 months we've done nothing pleasurable together ... our many weekends together have been solid work. Today was the last day.

The final dissertation is almost ready. I gave it a quick proof in the morning before driving to Birmingham (from Coventry) to help her print it off and then get packed up ready to leave. The document wouldnt all print. Certain files just didnt do anything. I have to try again later. Umu then realised she hadnt reconfirmed her flight 3 days in advance so we had to check it was all still OK for tomorrow.

Packing was chaos. So much stuff ... heavy cases of books and papers that need to be shipped back and huge cases of stuff to take back tomorrow. You can't drive anywhere near her house (which is by a busy roundabout) and it all turned out to be two car loads. Make two journeys between Birmingham and Coventry loading and unloading. Get uber lost despite the sat nav. Get caught by a speed camera, stuck in a traffic jam behind an accident (at which point I rememer to Blip!). It rains constantly. Its my brothers birthday and we'd all planned to celebrate that and Umu's last day at a Thai restaurant in Reading, but have to cancel ... running out of time.

Get to Reading after midnight. Try to weigh Umu's luggage. Its 15 kilos overweight so start repacking. 1.30am get to sleep (on the sofa so Umu has a bed) but realise I'm not sure of the route to Heathrow and cant aford to get lost so don't sleep much. Umu gets up at 6am. She's excited. I'm tired. I still have her dissertation to sort out and a back room piled up with stuff to ship back to SL for her. This is not a day I ever want to have to go through again. Thanks to SC for calling to make sure I survie the day.