Update

Well I still haven’t finished talking about the village trip, but I think that the photos will probably just stay unaccompanied by proper story until I get around to telling it in chronological order.

Life is very busy here at the moment – one day of classes left, athletics carnival on Friday, and reports due either tomorrow or the next day, plus student record cards to do and a mid-year report due on the IT department. Think that one will probably slip by the wayside… It can wait – reports can’t.

I told my magazine committee I couldn’t possible get the next issue of EmVille Express out by the end of term, but you know me – I’m trying anyway…

Jono comes tomorrow, and as well as picking him up from the airport I also have to take Sr Angela to a meeting at De La Salle, and then take the dog to the vet as well. Crikey. She didn’t know whether to frown or laugh when I told her “I’m not picking that bloody dog up”, after she’d just suggested I do that very thing. (Fortunately she went for the amused option!) I thought it was the rotten old thing that’s tried to eat me on several occasions, but it turns out it’s the latest acquisition I need to take, off to get neutered (apparently just living at the convent doesn’t do the trick).

I caught the bus into town last night to meet Lea at the Holiday Inn again, to later go to an AVI dinner, where we caught up with Chris (one of our PNG AVI manager-type people) as well as meet the new batch of vols.

Had to take the negatives from the Quest into town this afternoon to get the copies the girls have ordered before they go home, so I have to get them tomorrow as well.

No wonder Pia started writing me a list of things to do tomorrow this afternoon!

And bloody Daltron has buggered around with their email accounts – apparently they’ve upgraded the settings and we now have to re-arrange our pop server addresses – but they nicely failed to let any of their clients know this! For the last 2 or 3 days I’ve been totally frustrated, wondering why I can’t send any mail out – and even downloading emails is a problem. Hopefully sometime soon they might think to let us know how we can use our accounts again.

* * * * *

Haven’t mentioned the dance last Friday properly yet. It was a fund-raising dance (as they always are), supposedly put on by the ex-Marianville students – but none of them showed up! The bus went to get them too late, and their security guards at UPNG wouldn’t let them out! So, after getting all excited about a night on the town, Pia, a bunch of other teachers and I sat around for about 3 hours, complaining about the music (a live band, which I actually thought was pretty good) and waiting for people to arrive. Fortunately around 11 o’clock another bunch of people came (some staff, one ex-VSO who’s going out with one of our teachers) and that really livened things up. This Helen (from England) was so funny – she really got the party started by just jumping out onto the dance floor and dragging everyone else up too.

I had already made it out there twice before that – a couple of feet away from us was a bunch of 5 boys who were also sitting there bored. They’d obviously thought the ex-Marianvilles would be there, and I’d been feeling some eyes on me for a while (being the only white chick, and just about the only girl under 40 in the place at that time, you get that), and finally one of them walked over to us and pulled quite a confident little line on me (despite the dreadful beginning addressed to the group “I know you ladies are about twice my age but…”) – “I made a promise to myself that before I die I’ll dance with an American and an Englishwoman and a Canadian and an Australian” – and held out his hand to me. Well, what could I do but join him? No one else on the dance floor, mind you, and probably the worst song the band had played all night. Very stiff and awkward, and made even more so by his comment halfway through “I hope you don’t have any kids at POMIS” (POM International School). How old did I feel then?!!! I just laughed and said I didn’t have any kids at all. Then I made the mistake of asking him if he was from POMIS (assuming he was a teacher), and he told me he went there!! Oh dear. The song ended soon after and we shuffled our separate ways back to our seats.

But, nothing daunted, he came back again about twenty minutes later, and rectified his past mistake by saying “You’re not really a teacher at Marianville, are you?”, before telling me he was actually ex-POMIS and now studying law at UPNG, and was I sure I was a teacher… and were these all the moves I had? Hmmm.

Cute boy, very young, but definitely worth another dance later on in the night, in between getting pulled up by Joyce, our drunken policeman’s wife (who told me numerous times that night she wanted to go to Australia and go to a proper strip bar), several other teachers, and a couple of the blokes (husbands/staff). It was a fun night, in the end, even if we had to sit through several hours of boredom to get to that point. And not ridiculously late – home and in bed by 2am. Good one. Don’t think it raised much money though!