Birthday Boy

This week we celebrated Samuel's second birthday. It seems an incredibly short amount of time since we were in the hospital with a brand new baby and conversely it seems like he's also been part of our lives so long we couldn't imagine (or should that be can't remember) life without him.

It's also a special time as we await the arrival of his little sibling, who is due at the end of August. Next birthday, God willing, we will be a family of four, which sounds like a real grown up family!

Anyway, back to Samuel's birthday. We celebrated with a party with four of Samuel's friends and their parents in our flat. All boys. There was time playing with new toys (two minor meltdowns over who got to ride Sam's new trike), time playing games (one minor meltdown over the fact the music kept stopping in musical bumps), food (no meltdowns, although one refusal to eat) and then cake! (This made everyone very happy).

We live under the flight path for both local and international planes. Kathmandu International Airport is no Heathrow, but a few times each day we have the planes passing over our flat, and Sam loves pointing them out and going “Neeauun” as they pass. So we felt an Airplane cake was appropriate and Dan made a good effort (at least for someone with the artistic skills of a Sea Cucumber) and it was very much enjoyed by Samuel.

So year number 2 is complete, and Samuel is now on his way to 3, passing through the terrible two's, becoming a big brother, and hopefully becoming conversant in English and Nepali on the way.

Update on Needs

Hi all.
Our last blog was written just over two months ago. Sorry for the long delay. Just wanted to update on our staffing needs.

Well since we last wrote we have been blessed with several teachers. The primary school in particular have seen many teachers come forward, and they are now in the position of potentially having too many teachers, as we actually don't have enough classrooms for any more classes, even though we have enough students. It's a good position to be in!

The secondary school are now looking well staffed for August too, although we still have a couple of needs. We have no Art teacher for August and so we are in desperate need of an Art Teacher to come for August. If you know of anyone do let us know. We also could do with an English teacher, although we can cope without, it would relieve a lot of burdens off several other staff. And we also need History and Study Support Heads of Faculties for January. If you know of anyone, send them our website link:
www.kisc.edu.np

Quite a Day

This day happened to Dan a few weeks ago and we have been meaning to put it on our blog for a little bit, so here it goes.

7am: Breakast is interrupted by a phone call from the principal – a teacher is in hospital, she had her appendix out during the night. Another teacher stayed with her in hospital all night. The Principal is going in now and will be in school at 11. The other teacher is going home to bed and will be in about lunchtime.

8am: In school taking form class and then teaching my first ever RE lesson.

9am CEO pops her head into lesson and informs me that 3 members of SMT (Senior Management team) are going off site for our board meeting until after lunch and with the Secondary Principal in hospital, I and primary vice-principal are in charge of whole school, in case of emergency situation.

10am: I meet with our new ICT Systems manager to discuss current development issues including moving email system to Google. A quiet hour.

11am: Break time. Reminded by admin manager I have a 1.30 meeting with a potential parent who wants the British Education system explained, as they are currently in an American school. Then the site manager comes and informs me that we only have 12 days left of fuel for the generator and that we can’t get any more diesel due to a fuel crisis. Principal arrives back on site. I go teach as break finishes.

12pm: Teaching Year 10 ICT

1pm: I return to school having popped home for lunch. 1.30pm appointment doesn’t arrive. Informed teacher maybe coming out of hospital today, which is particularly significant as she’ll be coming to stay with us for a few days while she recovers.

2pm: I’m busy running around school organizing cover and plans for school tomorrow as there has been a general strike (bandh) called. We still plan to open but will not run buses and vans, which means around 1/3 of students won’t be in and 4 members of the teaching staff.
Also start to make plans for generator. Realise that we will have to start turning off generator at 3pm to conserve fuel instead of running it after school to allow staff and students to do work. We also have to consider the possibility of turning it off during the school day during periods when there isn’t so much demand.

3pm: School finishes. Whole secondary school lines up on roof as normal for notices etc. I explain tomorrows procedures. It has a particular impact on the students in Year 11, 12 & 13 who are just days away from starting their IGCSE, AS & A level examinations and so can’t afford to miss a day of school. Those who live beyond walking distance will make arrangements to stay with friends who live closer so they can get in the next morning.

4pm: Dashed home from school, Becky off into hospital to relieve the person who’s there with our teacher. I’m bathing Samuel and then entertaining him.

5pm: I’m about to put dinner on for Sam when I get a phone call from Becky to say hospital bill is huge and they need another 46,000 rupees (about £400). I spend nearly half an hour ringing round people trying to get enough cash together (hospital doesn’t take cards) and find people able to take the money into the hospital to pay the bill so she can leave. Eventually do.

6pm: Sit down with Sam to eat our slightly later than planned dinner. After dinner Becky & the teacher arrive home from hospital minus one appendix.

7pm Sam is just in bed and I am reheating dinner for Becky so she can have some. Our patient is Skyping family back in the UK to let them know she is ok.

8pm: Sam has been asleep for an hour, our patient is also asleep. Becky and I share some quiet time together and watch a DVD.

9pm Pregnant Becky goes to bed, I stay up for another hour reading. Then off to bed for sleep, ready for another (hopefully slightly less) eventful day.

Urgent Needs

Working at KISC we learn to live by faith when it comes to staffing. And God has always been faithful. Every year we wait patiently for the new staff to sign on and they always do. KISC has been going 23 years and always had enough staff to function, even though the majority are volunteers, supported by home churches and living thousands of miles from “home”. However this year the situation is more extreme than it has been for a long time.

We have several urgent needs to be able to run well next year. If you are a teacher, or you know someone who is, then please look at the list below and see if there is anything you could do to help, or pass it on to someone who might be interested. Teachers need to have some support, usually through a mission or from churches, although KISC can offer a little financial support, it’s not enough to live on. This enables us to keep our fees at rates that missions can afford.

We need for August 2011 (roughly in order of urgency)
• Head of English
• 2 Primary Grade teachers
• English Teacher
• Head of Humanities or History teacher or Geography teacher (preference is in that order)
• Primary Vice Principal
• Art Teacher
• Another Primary Grade Teacher and a Reception teacher
• Student support teachers (those who can help with students with learning needs including ESL students), both Primary & Secondary

And from December 2011
• History or Geography Teacher (opposite of whichever comes in August!)
• Head of Student Support
• French teacher

Please pray. Please consider if you could commit one year of your life to making a huge difference in the lives of some amazing kids, and as a result play your part in the work of development, and the spreading of the Gospel here in Nepal.

For more details or to apply click here.

BMS Day of Prayer

Monday is the 2011 BMS World Mission Day of Prayer. So this afternoon a group of us got together at our house to pray. It was good to spend some time together thinking and praying for the work that BMS are involved with all over the world. We were guided in our prayer by resources from BMS’s own website, which you can download by clicking here.

It’s also a special couple of days as we know tomorrow churches across the UK will be praying for the work of BMS and on Monday the BMS offices in Didcot and others all over the world will also be joining in prayer. So if you want more information follow this link to the BMS Website.

BMS Day of Prayer 2011

A week at KISC

Stealing an idea from another blog we read we thought we’d do a week in our lives. This time we’re with Dan.

Monday
In the Secondary school we have assemblies on Monday and Friday. This week was exam week for our senior students at KISC so our assemblies are always slightly disjointed as we try to fit 80 students into a room setup for 40 to take exams. However, the students gather round and sit on the edges of tables and we carry on regardless. After assembly I was running the Secondary Leadership Meeting, the “workhorse of the secondary school”. This week we were trying to finalise our assessment policy to cement changes that have been taking place over the last 2 and a half years. One of my key roles is in managing all the curriculum and assessment of the whole school, and while we are mostly a British Curriculum we try to be as truly international as possible to enable our students to study anywhere in the world after KISC. So setting up an assessment policy that enables that involves a lot of work and development.
The rest of Monday saw me teaching Grade 8, but a bonus free as Grade 12 were in exams.

Tuesday
Tuesday begins with homeroom, and I am the Grade 8 homeroom teacher. Grade 8 is the biggest year group in the whole school at 19 students, but of course that’s small compared to the UK.
This term we’ve been looking at slavery in PSHE, so I gave them this morning’s homeroom to work in groups looking at some of the tactics of the abolitionists in the 17th & 18th Century. Next week we will be comparing slavery of that time to modern day slavery. I actually had no classes after that as the rest were in exams, and so I had a productive day of work, doing some planning for my classes over the next few weeks. Tuesday evening is our house group where we meet with a bunch of other expats to study the bible and pray together.

Wednesday
Wednesday is always my teaching free day, so again it was a day of getting admin done, this time focusing on updating all our handbooks for the various different sets of parents and staff ready for next school year. At the beginning of March we will be asking the students to select their IGCSE and AS options ready for me to plough away at the timetable for 4 months. We’ve also decided to completely restructure the daily lesson times and move to a two week timetable, so I will have all that to factor into next year.

Thursday
Thursday was a slightly crazy day and went from a massive high to a deep low as the day went on, but it all worked out ok in the end. Since Christmas we had been having problems with some very important software, our whole school database. We have a very impressive system, which contains all our staff and student and parents details as well as all the details about the courses students are studying and their grades and reports. However, this wasn’t working and our technical ICT staff had been working all hours to try to fix it since the start of term, they had got it working in stages, over the week but crucially we still couldn’t get any outputs working. Having a lot of data stored in a computer with no way of getting it out is fairly useless. Finally, around lunchtime, we were able to print out some data and I was very happy. However, about an hour later we realised that the data it was pumping out was old and didn’t include any recent updates, including the reports a number of our staff had been writing. We thought for a while it had all been lost, but then thankfully it was retrieved and now we have a fully working system.

Friday
Friday often focuses on SMT (Senior Management Team) for me. This is made up of the heads of each section of the school and deals with all the big issues of the whole school. This Friday we focused on our staffing needs that are ongoing and we were discussing how we get “the right people on the bus” to enable us to continue to be the best school we possibly can. It was a good end to a busy week.

Some news articles on Nepal from the BBC:
Working by Candelight
Prime Minister at last

Happy Christmas

We were trying to think of what to write for a blog this week, and the best idea we’d had was a traditional Christmas Family letter style blog. Till Wednesday when we had a fun morning out.

Kathmandu is getting very cold at the moment and so, with no central heating the evenings (at 5oC) are uncomfortable without a heater. We’ve been using a gas heater which had been playing up a bit with the flame shooting up a lot higher than it was supposed to, making us reluctant to use it. So rubbish at DIY Dan decided to investigate.

Changing the gas bottle worked, but on closer investigation I realised the gas bottle seemed to be leaking a little, but only when it was turned on. So I decided to change the regulator to see if that helped, it didn’t, the bottle still leaked.

Now the fun started while trying to change the regulator, as the plastic pipe going to the regulator was attached so tightly I couldn’t pull it off, so out came my trusty penknife to slice the pipe off (gas turned off by this point). To be honest I’ve always thought my pen knife was a bit blunt. My thumb proved otherwise…

And so, a dash up to Patan Hospital. Now I had picked the best time of the week to do the slicing, 8.45am on a Wednesday morning, as the Foreigners clinic is at 9am on a Wednesday. So we stuck our head in and asked if they did stitches. The two doctors and one nurse were having a quiet morning with no other patients in so they were happy to help.

Becky, being no fan of blood, needles and other such stuff, elected to wait outside the room while the doctors and nurse set to work. While trying to put anaesthetic into Dan’s thumb (right on the middle knuckle) Dan decided he’d had enough and passed out through the pain.

So Dan ended up having his two stitches done, while lying on the floor of the room, with two doctors a nurse, and now Becky in attendance.
And now for something completely different…

We wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a Wonderful New Year. May you know God’s Blessings as we celebrate the birth of His Son Jesus Christ, our Saviour.