Biblionef

I took receipt of two boxes this evening which made me very happy. One, I didn’t have to go and pick them up from Mqanduli (70k away along the pot-hole road of doom) and two, they are full of useful free stuff. A big thankyou to Brian, who also brought me beer. The circle o favours goes round and round.

Biblionef are an organisation that give you free books in the local language. Simple as that, really. So I got in touch and they sent me two boxes of books and posters for the pre-school. Bingo. They give you brand new stuff because often kids get crappy old old gear and they really deserve better. Which seems like a nice thing to me. There is also Duplo in the box, which I am taking as commission. I may also take the Miffy book. You have to skim some off the top to make volunteering worthwhile.

So well done, Biblionef (tell your friends) and happy days, because now we have lots of cool pictures to put on the walls and books for Thandeka to read to the kids.

Today we got up to 12. We started with 6, so that is progress. One of the kids is the boy of the road engineer lady. Mad props to her for being a black female in a high powered job in a male dominated industry, but her son is a bit of a brat. He cried and snotted out of his nose a lot, whilst displaying the lollies that he brought that none of the other kids could afford. In fairness, he did share, but I think that was Thandeka’s doing. I think she is going to bring him round. He played pretty much on his own today, but you could see he was eyeing up the big group of kids that Thandeka was working with and praising, etc, and feeling left out. Kids are mental.

Stole a quick chat with Ben Gaunt (One of the founder doctors and Chief Medical Officer for hospital) this evening. His time is precious and he is rarely not busy as hell, but he always listens if he can. He is extremely ambitious and looking ahead to when we have 100 pre-schools in the area, similarly run and stocked. It is good to have someone looking ahead like that because I am pretty narrowly focused at present.