8th June 2016
After a wonderful yet exhausting weekend in the jungle,
Monday morning rolled around and it was time for my first experience of project
planning. Every Monday morning we have fifteen minutes to plan each of the
eight projects in our timetable that week. Now, fifteen minutes is not very
long to plan a two hour creative therapy session. And it’s really not long
enough to plan a two hour English lesson. Through delegation of tasks it is
possible, but it was rather stressful. There was so much information to take in
and I became completely overwhelmed for the first time since I left the UK.
Friends were all so helpful; one even took my timetable and wrote out where I
was supposed to be and when by hand so I could read it more clearly. So I
started the week not overly confident on how these sessions were going to go.
The way my timetable works is as follows. We have two
projects a day (morning and afternoon) with Monday mornings reserved for
project planning and Friday afternoons free for us to go travelling for the
weekend. Turns out, I didn’t need to stress about it. Projects this week have
gone well so far. They’ve been challenging, sure, but so rewarding. Running
down a corridor after children to bring them back into the classroom every five
minutes is not the most fun, but it’s good exercise! And the kids can’t help it
(they had special needs). With that group in particular, we found a few games
that worked perfectly with them, and seeing the smiles on their faces made the
exhaustion completely worth it. I accidently got into a mini water fight with a
young boy yesterday at the project. They had balloons to play volleyball with
and one of them had the smart idea to fill one with water. I tried to recover
this balloon before it was full, which resulted in the boy splashing me and me
splashing him back. I actually didn’t mind at all. The whole session was
chaotic but I loved it. These boys were in a children’s home, and probably got
little adult attention. They thought splashing me was hilarious and were all
smiling and laughing. We managed to get them to do some work on their English
(they are a really intelligent bunch of kids), and so for me it was a
successful session. It’s all been really hard work, harder than I was
expecting, but I have honestly loved it.
After projects yesterday afternoon, I was followed home by a
group of about ten monkeys up on the electricity wires. Every time we walked,
they followed. Every time we stopped, they stopped and looked at us all
innocently. We got rather paranoid that they would attack us and were nervously
laughing. They were adorable, but monkeys around here will try and take your
stuff. We came across a couple of other people in the road, and at this point
the monkeys stopped following us; I like to think we showed them who was boss...
So we got home in one piece with all of our belongings intact, though still
slightly nervous.
The past couple of days, I have had a horrible heat rash
covering my entire torso. I have several swollen mosquito bites (I’m allergic)
and today have a really bad tummy, and so have been bedridden the entire day.
All of this has made me quite homesick. A kitten was in our house a couple
nights ago which made it all so much worse. He was just so adorable and small
and made me miss my cats. And I keep having dreams about computer games. I
actually dreamt that I bought a Gameboy Colour with a Harry Potter game and Pokémon
Red. And feeling poorly hasn’t helped. I’d love a cup of tea and a cuddle with
my cats right now. Yesterday was someone’s birthday so a group of us took the
half hour bus to the nearest city and went to Pizza Hut. After ten days in Sri
Lanka, I was seriously craving something that wasn’t rice and curry. That first
bite of pizza was incredible, my mouth is watering now just writing about it.
We had such a lovely time with all our Western food and princess party hats,
even if the rest of the restaurant thought we were mad. It was just what I
needed, and I went to bed feeling a hundred times better.
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