Nairobi, Revisited

Dear everybody,

This one is a little longer, so pour something. I've just spent ten days in Nairobi - my first posting abroad, a lifetime ago, when my biggest professional worry was whether the ministry officials would take a meeting and my biggest personal worry was learning to make chapati. Twenty-six years later, the city has doubled, the jacarandas have tripled, and the traffic has achieved something beyond scale.

Going back to school

I visited three schools our old programs touched, which is a strange thing to do as a tourist and a wonderful thing to do as a retiree. At the first one, the head teacher - not yet born when I left - showed me a library with a plaque I had genuinely forgotten:

“Books before buildings. Dedicated to the readers.”

The library is now too small for the school, which is the best kind of problem a library can have.

A few things I recognized and one I didn't:

• The recess roar. Identical in every language, every decade.

• Chalk dust on a teacher's sleeve, right where it always lands.

• Students who ask better questions than the inspectors ever did.

• Solar panels on the roof, and a computer lab with a waiting list.

Old friends

The best day was lunch with Grace, who was a first-year teacher when I was a second-year everything. She now trains teachers across three counties and claims, with evidence, that the reading program outlasted every document I ever drafted about it. “The paperwork faded,” she said, “but the children kept reading.” I have decided this is the only performance review I need.

If any of the old crowd is reading this: the offer of dinner stands, the porch is large, and I finally have the free time I kept promising you.

Yours, a little misty over the tea,

• Tom