missed meeting

Many of our parents from school haven’t paid school fees for the term that just finished…and as the end of the month was coming while we were over break we thought that we would give them 2 days (7-9am) during break that they could come to pay their fees as their child would not be allowed to start term 3 without being fully paid. I was therefore at the office for 2 hours on a Wednesday over break and no parents came…I did some other jobs so it wasn’t worthless but really. But then it was also before the last day of the month and things are often late anyway. So there was a second date on the second of april. I had gotten it into my head that the second was Tuesday…completely convinced. So Monday morning I woke up and it was pouring down. I was quite happy there was nowhere that I needed to be. Took my time and the rain let up so I went to the hospital to do some of the paperwork (found some emails that had been missing) and then at 9 (when the office hours would have been over) I got a text ALL IN CAPITALS (that is a normal Malawian way of writing) asking Reynier Ter Haar to let his wife know that people were waiting for me at school. But I couldn’t figure out who or why people were waiting for me.
I finally tracked down that it was a parent waiting at school and they had been there for ages…but of course no one tried to contact me any earlier…I looked at the announcement I had sent home and I was wrong…supposed to be there on Monday…oops. But then I also notice that people here don’t wait for azungu whereas they will wait for hours upon hours for Malawians. So I rushed over to school to find one parent there and he just wanted to assure me that he would pay as soon as he had gotten paid…also that there had been other parents there but they left. So I still collected no money. Willeke offered to be there on Tuesday morning so I sent texts to all the parents who still owed and I think 2 parents might have come to pay. So 2 down about 20 to go…