One of my students, Jesus, said his Dad took out teeth. I asked where his dentist practice was and he said he wasn’t an official dentist. He is the village unofficial dentist. He takes out teeth with pliers.
When I came round from my near faint, it was to find the Jesus showing me how his dad had taken his milk teeth out. Apparently his dad is very good and it hardly hurts at all as he is so quick – he quickly hits the tooth and then whips it out with pliers. There are many toothless smiles amongst the village elders, I wonder if the unofficial village dentist has had a role to play in these gummy grins.
I declined nicely, deciding that while having my tooth removed by Jesus’s father would have made me smile, the prospect of someone coming and hitting my tooth and then whipping it out with pliers is too truly terrifying to contemplate.
This is a relatively new Jesus who has started classes and he is a cousin of a few others. It used to be that Manuel, our builder’s, nieces and nephews used to form a large proportion of my students, however over the last year or two, another family has been gradually adding cousins and assorted relatives. This week I was pleased to note that another recent student in fact joins the two families as she is a cousin of Manuel’s nieces and nephews as well as a cousin of Jesus and his cousins. It is like doing a village join-the-dots puzzle!
One thing I have noticed is that many of the children in the class come from huge families. One child’s dad is one of eight siblings and his mum one of 7. This is by no means unusual (and explains the high volume of cousins). However, the children themselves have much less in the way of siblings. I can think of families with two or three children, and perhaps one with four, however certainly not the large families that were in existence a generation a go. So, is this a sign of the loosening of the church’s grip on family life, better education or a mixture of factors?
The weather has been wet and windy this week – however it has been another one of those strange phenomenon that we experience when the wind is actually very warm – much warmer than the ambient temperature. It was like standing in a hair dryer!
No change in Herbie’s health. We still would not know that there is anything wrong with him other than his cough. He has recently decided that I am his favourite person and seeks me out when I am sat down. Today, when I went to class today he did his little Herbie jog after me. I took him into the class, however unlike the little girls who just want to hug him and carry him around – these two little boys wanted me to put him on the floor so they could watch him bump into things!