I've been a little bit homesick mid week this week. I think it was because I was getting a bit bored. The lessons are great but in between I have about 2 hours spread out of just playing with the children which gets a little bit tedious. However we had an educational meeting on Friday and we have built some more into our schedule.
After the water festival we are going to start doing Home based care visits on a Friday afternoon, we will visit the homes of HIV children on the Magna program but not living in the orphanage, so as to monitor their health and the taking of their treatment. This means that we have had to shuffle our schedule leaving us with less free time, which makes me much happier. We are also organizing trips swimming at a hotel with Sothy the deaf and partially blind child, and an arts and crafts club on a Thursday morning. Application for materials has to be made a month in advance though so it can be put in the monthly budget, so the arts and crafts club wont start for a little while, its very strange and a bit frustrating not being able to have materials and stationary on demand. We have been asked to set monthly mini tests for our English students, write reports on the kids every 3 months and update the children's files and send reports to the sponsors every six months. Hopefully this will all keep me sufficiently busy.
The very young children started pre-school this week which means that we are left with the slightly older ones for the morning lesson. I am happy about this as the children left in our class are old enough to learn some English, and some of them are behind in their education due to time spent ill or in hospital so it is nice to give them extra attention.
This week I was taken for dinner, by a couple of the staff to a street cafe serving what they call porridge. It ][you either couldn't taste or got overwhelming amounts of in a mouthful, strips of a vegetable which tasted like ginger soaked in sugar, eggs which at first I was pleased to see but I think they were pickled and in the very early stages of growing a chick, served with stuffed intestine and stomach. I don't think i disguised my horror very well and ate very little under the excuse that I find rice incredibly filling. I went home however to find the mas had cooked my favorite of their dishes, a spinach and chicken and sauce stir fry thing. Which I ate with delight. We had our first Cambodian deep fried battered banana, it was sooooo yummy, but I think contained enough calories to last a week. I am getting used to the orphanage food now and enjoying it, though I still pick around the meat.
I received parcels this week! I had to wait 5 days before I could go to the post office and pick them up, I am pretty sure I was more excited and probably more grateful for those parcels than I have been about Christmas presents in a long time.
We only have two days of work this week and then we are going up to Siem Reip as we think there will be some celebrations for the Water Festival, and we are going to visit two of the other Project trust volunteers, I am very excited.
Going back home now to see how well our mattress is drying out, we had a massive downpour in the past 12hours, so we came in for lunch today to find the home surrounded by water and a huge puddle in the middle of our room and our mattress was sodden.
Jum reap lear
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