Lots of laughs

On Wednesday I made laughing gas for my third years. We have to study nitrogen compounds in chemistry, so dinitrogen oxide (laughing gas) is part of the syllabus. The book told me that I was supposed to strongly heat ammonium nitrate, which meant I had to take one of the unlabeled bottles which I hoped was nitric acid and mix it with ammonia (never any doubt about ammonia, since its noxious smell is pretty distinctive). I think it went well. I was able to narrate convincingly for the students what was going on (first releasing ammonia gas, which changed red litmus to blue, then water vapor which condenses on the side, and then laughing gas, which relights a glowing splint). Also, I got to breathe much nicer fumes than I usually ingest.

Yesterday, I got the chance to do a lab with my second years. This is the first time I've taken them into the lab for a practical lesson. This one was a bit delayed because craftsmen were doing work to install gas taps. Unfortunately, during the process, our distilled water got sent to the kitchen and used there (pretty expensive water to use for cooking). I had to use tap water. That doesn't work so well for preparing solutions, since most of them formed precipitates before the lab. The students were pretty eager and they definitely enjoyed getting to use real test tubes and beakers and staring at solutions to see if a solid was forming. I think it was the worst lab session I've run in some time. I'll try to redo it when I can get some distilled water.

Today I arrived at school at 7:10 to get some extra time for reviewing chemistry with the fourth years. I lost some lesson time this week, since my voice has been pretty weak (still getting over that cold). Then, over the course of the day, I was pretty busy for the next 11 hours at school. Somehow I wound up not teaching a single lesson. The morning, the headmaster had me typing some things for him (the secretary is out for the rest of the term, so we all have to pick up some of the slack, since she had a whole lot of responsibilities). The afternoon was given over to a priest to pray for the students to do well on their exams. He told some pretty good jokes, so that was fun. After school, a truck came to deliver water. I stood around collecting the water that was leaking from the hose. I ran around the compound collecting containers to store water so it wouldn't be wasted. I explained to my students that I was stealing water from the weeds so that I could give it to the trees. I was around the truck for almost 2 hours and I collected more than 50 liters (12 gallons) of water. You might not find that as exciting as I do.

In other news, I got some pretty useful emails this week about our HIV hotline, so I'm feeling pretty optimistic about that. Now I just need to get some more things done on some of my other projects.