It’s humid tonight in Ziguinchor; the rains are building up but are still a long way off. The sky, close to dusk, is pearly as the light catches the gathering clouds. A man reads the news in wolof, the sound crackling from a radio in the distance, and there is the rise and fall of the women of the house chatting, arguing, bellowing from outside, where it is cool.

Things have changed and things are the same. One of the girls is pregnant, her stomach protruding and her breast large beneath a stained red t-shirt. She was always in trouble, this girl, having been found on the streets of Dakar, the daughter of a distant relative, by NS and brought up as one of her own children. But she never really recovered, perhaps 16 is too old to rescue a child, and when I lived here the house was always full of the stories of F, and her insistence on jumping over the compound wall at night, running feral in the town, staying out with boys till dawn and sleeping all day.

She used to be slim and wear tight jeans, skimpy tops. Now her breast droop, she has heavy acne on her jaw, and she looks old and tired, although probably only 22. The father of the child appears to have moved into the compound too, so the boys’ room- with a small double bed and no room for anything else- must now have about 5 men in there. They emerge at various times in the morning, each looking too big for the corrugated metal doorway, and definitely too big to be sharing one small bed.

Another thing which has changed, which I have been following in the news but never really quite appreciated, is that everyone is poorer. It is palpable. The one tap for the house, plumbed into the perimeter wall, now has a sturdy lock on it so that only she with the key, the indomitable NS, can make the expensive liquid run. Papa has already told me, by phone to Dakar yesterday, that they are in a crisis, but the most pressing of problems is the water bill, which they simply can not pay. I am expected to find a solution, which now that I see how bad things are, could not argue with.

There is not a pot in the house in which I could boil water, because they all have holes in them. Yet none have been thrown away; a pot with a hole is better than no pot. Although I had to boil water twice to get a cup full; the water dripped all the way down the gas bottle and onto the ripped lino floor.

This was after I noticed that lunch, a welcoming, generous dish of fried fish and onion sauce, was cooked on a coal burner. We used to use coal for the slow-cook stuff like rice, but a gas burner for the other things that were needed more instantly, like hot water for breakfast, or the lunch sauce. Now there is no more gas in the house; the heavy bottles lie empty, pocked and rusted in the corner. I sent one of the boys out to fill one up, and notice that the price of gas has gone up a third since I last bought a bottle. For a family that probably gets through one a week, this is untenable.

I saved half of my special lunch for dinner, but the kids found it early this evening and have eaten it all.

This afternoon we had English class in which I lined 7 kids up on a bench and taught them some basic English. They can not tell the difference between ‘three’ and ‘fruit’, which in French sounds very much like the English number. One of the girls gets it all immediately, but can not concentrate for more than five minutes before she starts falling off her chair. Another of the girls, slightly older, is now speaking French and gets the English easily. She is 8, and this is the fourth language she understands. The boys are slower, although the quieter ones better, and the little boys from next door who look like they were starved of oxygen at birth, are actually brighter than they look. Kati, who is beautiful and not much trouble, doesn’t get it at all; I expect she will always be the pretty girl.