The tower....

I wrote a list of all the things I wanted in a school for my daughter.. Radioactive emissions wasn't near the top. I was thinking of abstract things - well, like appreciation of cultural diversity, tolerance, well-kept grounds, a good curriculum, perhaps an animal or two, trees, space - that kind of thing.

So when I realised that my budget would only allow me to choose from a handful of local government schools I accepted that (with no grace at all - in fact with a lot of cursing and rending of clothing and vows to move the family out of the house and into the car) and began looking at my options. There weren't that many. One school was ruled out easily by their insistence that Grade 1s play hockey - my God - why not just clobber them on the shins at orientation and get over with - it'd be much cheaper..

So I found a school - nice enough, lots of trees, a good ethos (only 15 minutes of homework for Grade 1s), an interest in the arts and an impressive swimming coach, aftercare offered and just up the road from the office AND a great big hulking hideous cell phone tower! Right over the swimming pool. Honestly, I flirt with enviromentalism - I'm not a die-hard but I try and recycle and keep electricity usage at an acceptable level, I buy organic and lots of rose-geranium oil. But when I saw that cell-phone tower lots of alarm bells went off. And that marked the beginning of my research.

The purpose of this post is that hopefully someone else experiencing my dilemma will be directed to this post early in their search and be saved the time it takes to find out that...

the jury is out. They may be hazardous, they may not be, noone really knows for sure the long term effects and both sides have very convincing arguments. As of 2010 the technology is developing so fast that government can't keep up and provide policing and here in the developing world it probably isn't high on the agenda anyway. The bottom line too is that the school is receiving monthly payments from the networks and cash-strapped state schools can't really be sneezing at that.

Anyway I thought we might move - out of Pmb up to Hilton , the land of schools with fairy gardens and musical programmes - we took a tree-lined drive to have alook and sighed and ooo-ed and ahh-ed at the beauty of Hilton. We looked at the school and it's beautiful, old styley buildings and many trees and we breathed in the fresh clean air and thought perhaps a move would not be a bad thing and then we turned around to look at the view:

siggghhhh.....