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Self-portrait by Toroa, cycling to school. |
Sept 2nd: Back Home On the right is a drawing of Toroa with his bag full of school books. He started High School and now is the first to rise each morning and on average carries about 10 books to school each day. He loves High School, not because there are others in his class who also hate gym but because he is popular with a group of girls. Toroa has become very organized now, having only lost his locker key once, and still getting his collection of 40 or so school books, plus folders and CDs, sorted out. |
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When we arrived back, Sen noticed that there was a terrible smell coming from the cellar of one of our neighbours. He, an elderly man, never went down and in typical engaged Dutch style, none of our other neighbours seemed to notice. It turned out that there was a leak from a sewage pipe and his cellar was full of rotting things soaked in the sewage water. The whole cellar area stunk for weeks. We joked about it possibly being like this the whole summer while we were away!
None of the 8 flats (admittedly 3 of the flats have only Arabic or Berber-speakers) in our building ever does anything if a light burns out or when the lock to the front door wore out, so it is usually Sen who rings the housing corporation. We didn't have a way of getting through the front door with a key for about a month earlier in the year. I doubt that a 'nicer' area would have to wait a month for a new lock for the front door to their apartment. However there is one one man in our building who constantly puts up notices on the windows to tell us to keep the door closed, after breaking the magnetic strip so that the door can't be held open. |
More to come...
Sonja back at work and in a new room with no telephone, the saga of the telephone cord, rushing around to get all the games and homepage for bookweek done, Tama's dictionary and Tama doing homework for the first time, feast of macht and the shadow play, Sen's course adjustments, Monument weekend, shots of Leiden for the Oxford trip, Sen's parents visit (20, 21, 22), Tama bakes a carrot cake with Sen (23), Tama's birthday, Amsterdam (25), the sticks (26), The Hague (27), Tama and Sen felt-making in Archeon (27), the installation in the Lokhorst church (29)...all to come..... |