As a result of last night's escapades, I am now sitting with a forceful stare at the computer screen, to prevent myself from nodding off! All will be revealed in a bit if you can manage to read past the first few paragraphs. The night before the drama competition, Kirsty and I watched the 'Weeping Willow' dress rehearsal and after, we were asked to give comments, which we did and the kids listened and responded really well to them. Have to say that the performance was of a far higher standard than I expected, bearing in mind that they only had a couple of weeks to come up with a script, direct and produce it. Twelve schools in the KK region had entered into the competition, each with a drama around twenty minutes long, each portraying a positive moral of some kind. Purpose of this is to improve the English language and the kids spoke in perfect English and in some cases, putting on an English accent. I have to say there were some stonker performances all round. About four of the groups were pretty damn good, a few were like major soap operas and the final drama was OTT contemporary, all about a disturbed girl in a mental asylum, having flashbacks on her abusive past, leading to the murder of her abusive partner, was all a bit strange but I loved it! There was so much hair pulling as well! She had pig tails in, really long, and most of the way through the drama she was being pulled across the stage by them! There were lots of real tears in some performances as well, which were quite impressive and a few decent real slaps. All very dramatic. There was tension in the air as it came to the judges to announcement of the winner and by complete surprise for everyone, Kristy (Willow) from our school was awarded the prize for best actor. She was gobsmacked! The hall was filled with drama Queens, yet she was just so natural and nailed it. She's not the kind of person to gloat or anything, she was so contented and I could see she was mega proud of herself. Lately, Kirsty has been complaining about the hearing students, especially Form 1A who happen to be a nightmare, that I decided to lend a helping hand with some lessons this week. Boy, I could totally see that the kids were driving her up the wall and that she was up to her eyeballs with them. So appreciate the patient deaf kids, it is actually relaxing teaching them that I find ourselves going off the point in our lessons chatting about general stuff. Back to the point, at one point they weren't listening that Kirsty and I (first time for me) gave the hearing kids a third-degree, going 'If you pay attention, you'll get more fun out of this!' Seriously, my throat was sore from literally shouting at the kids in the hall as we were using the school hall to play Scottish sports, which meant it was interrupted by every other class and you couldn't even hear yourself speak. Last night, Kirsty switched on the lights and I moaned 'Now what? I've got to get up at 5.30am' till we obviously realised that it was the fire drill, but it took such mental strength to get out of bed. Felt like I was clocked back into those Mary Hare days with all the grumpy sleepy faces at 1am at the fire assembly point out on the volleyball court. Only difference was that I had to get fully dressed instead of throwing on a dressing gown as the Muslims would have a heart attack if I stood in the playground with my skimpy shorts and vest and the girls quickly had to put on their headscarves (can't be seen without them on in front of males). We seemed to be one of the last outside and the stragglers that came after, were asked to line up in front of everyone. The entire hostel had been evacuated for the fire drill and were sitting in their lines on, while about ten late comers stood facing them. Most of the kids that were late were deaf, cause their dorm mates (hearing) hadn't woken them up, which was well out of order. The deaf kids are separated into different dorms so that they share with hearing students, so that if there is ever a fire, they can be physically woken up etc. They don't have a fire alarm system here that they used the most irritating loudspeaker siren ever(Yes Majorca girlies, the exact same sound as the loudspeaker that got snatched off me and thrown in the swimming pool by some random man *giggles*). Seeing that DPM has assemblies at crazy times of the day like 6.45am, 10pm etc, we thought 'please don't let there be an assembly at this hour of night!'. Encik Mojuntin, a games teacher and warden staff and I'm telling you, he is worse than Mr Gywnn when it comes to punishments! He was literally shouting down the loudspeaker when he just could have spoken to the kids. Behind, I saw a bucket of water behind them and thought to myself 'Is this what I think it is?'. Yes, you guessed it right! Kirsty and I were completely shocked to see that, Mojuntin, proceeded to chuck the bucket of water over the poor souls head with an audience watching. At first it was side-splitting but then it was taking it a bit too far but we could see that the kids were completely humiliated and no one, not even most of the other students sitting down, found it funny. Fair do, in a western country it's might've been amusing, but here, to even touch a child's head is offensive, and to wet their clothes is really humiliating for them, especially the Muslim girls. The teachers seem to use humiliation as punishment quite often here. That is the one thing about Malaysia, they personally don't care if they embarrass you, not bearing in mind that kids do tend to be more sensitive than adults. Anyway, there was a severe lack of sleep all round and we were up bright and early this morning to teach the deaf kids to make Scottish shortbread. Kirsty wanted to get more involved in the deaf department as she finds it more rewarding. She was really impressed that she managed to take the class pretty much single handedly as Catherine and I helped her out with the odd word to sign. School surroundings smelled so good of shortbreads baking away in the cookery room that onlookers and teachers fished us compliments on our cooking skills. x