Keeping Warm??

I had to smile when I opened Esther's Science pack for this new term. This is her current text book, with this term's Science topic as the title:

 Learning about insulators and how to keep warm is not really top priority in Juba; it is not difficult to keep warm here!
Yesterday, our classroom thermometer showed a nice cool 28'C as we began our lessons at 08:15. It felt positively fresh!

By the afternoon, the temperature had risen. Out of interest, I placed out thermometer outside on our front doorstep in the full afternoon sun, sitting on our stone door-step. When we fetched it in, the thermometer registered 56'C!! (see MAX temperature:)

I brought the thermometer inside before it blew up in the heat! It took a while for it to cool down, but it climbed back through the 40s and our classroom registered around 32'C- until I turned on the air-con to get the room to a more comfortable temperature in the mid-20s.

Meanwhile, Esther's prescribed science investigations to find ways to insulate ice-cubes have been hard to manage. If we turn on the air-con and fans, it feels like we are cheating and not doing a fair test, but if we turn off the air-con, the ice melts so fast that it is hard to keep up with recording the results!

Just to add to the general heat in the atmosphere around here, it seems this is the season for burning grass. Everyone appears to be lighting fires! Grass, leaves and rubbish are constantly being burnt. Pollution levels must be at a high rate. Andrew says there is so much smoke in the air as he flies over the country, with fires everywhere.
The result of all this grass-burning is lots of ash. Ash literally rains out of the sky and falls on our skin, on our houses, on our door-steps:

These thin, black lines of soot and ash make black smudges on the washing we hang outside. It gets into the kid's shoes when they leave them on the doorstep, making their feet inky-black when they put them on. It is blown by the breeze into our houses, through the gap between the floor and the outside doors. Ash seems to be just another feature of this hot, dry season!