I have finally managed to get control of the blog! So here goes...

Our last few days in Varkala were pretty awesome. We had the most chilled out week, did lots of shopping and enjoyed some sun. All too soon the alarm was going off at 3.15 in the early hours of Sunday morning and we were soon enough at Trivandrum airport awaiting our flight to Sri Lanka. An hour after taking off we were landing in Colombo and straight away Sri Lanka seemed like a cool place to be. We spent a night in Ja Ela in a 'holding' house before what turned out to be a 9.5 hour transfer to Wasgamuwa on Monday. We arrived in the dark so couldn't fully grasp where we had landed ourselves! However, the next day in the light, we were able to see…

The Location-

Our home for the next 4 weeks is on the edge of the Wasgamuwa National Park in a tiny remote village called Pusselleyaya. The village is made up of small traditional mud brick houses all interlinked by narrow tracks which are currently a boggy clay/mudlike mess due to the unseasonal rain Sri Lanka has been experiencing L There is a little primary school which is where we are teaching for the first two weeks. Our house is down a particularly narrow track leading up a hill. We overlook a large lake surrounded by many hills and cloud shrouded mountains. We are surrounded by dense jungle like greenery so we feel right out in the wilderness- and we kinda are!! The nearest town is 3 hours away. Honestly, I swear Mowgli was less in the wilderness and nearer to civilization than us!!

The House-

This can only really be described as a giant mud hut with a corrugated iron roof which sits about two feet off the top of the walls/pillars to keep it cool. There's a communal dining/ living area which is completely open and overlooks the lake and mountains. There is only one door in the entire house (on the bathroom), so we get various passers through of either the four legged or feathered variety. The bedrooms are divided off with curtains, mud walls and bamboo blinds. Our bedroom is very homely!

Fellow residents and hangers on-

Along with Mike and I there are two other volunteers for the first two weeks doing the Conservation project. They are Jill the Canadian and Nancy the Mexican. Chinthuka is our local manager who oversees the projects and will be with us for the month. We have a housekeeper whos daughter cooks for us. They live down the road but are always around along with the housekeeper's young grandson, his friend and the local farmers. They have a bit of a poultry mission here too so there are chickens J, geese, guinea fowl and quail. The chickens have a habit of strolling through the house to see what grubs they can find. In the bedroom next to ours there's an incubator with eggs in and two pens with heat lamps and chicks. The other night whilst getting ready for bed, Mike exclaimed 'the chicks are noisy tonight!' Surreal moment haha. Other occupiers are a couple of cats and a tame giant squirrel called Ollie who likes to help type emails, has a penchant for stealing toothbrushes and has today broken a plate and pot and is currently in hiding. Some unwelcome visitors are the dogs who try to sleep on the beds , flies, mosquitoes, ants, giant beetles, spiders, geckos, mice in the rafters and fire flies (but they are quite cool).

So hopefully that gives you a fair idea of where we are. A bit of a shock to the system to start with after Varkala, but now it's home.

On Tuesday, our first full day, we were supposed to have our induction. To cut a very dull day short, we learnt a lot about the Conservation project, nothing about teaching, were promised a visit to the school which didn't happen and were then shown the 'teaching aid' cupboard which we could use but would have to tidy first. To say we were feeling a bit low come Tuesday evening would be an understatement! We reiterated a lot that we are not teachers and have no idea what we are doing and were told it would be fine, that we didn't need to plan anything as Chinthuka would be coming with us for our first day. Mike got a major bout of positive inspiration before bed, and come the morning it had rubbed off on me. So we set off for our first mornings teaching. We get there and are promptly stood in front of a class of children and told, 'There you go. Off you go and teach!' Somehow, we managed to pull off the biggest blag of our lives, and proceeded to pull off a slightly more practiced blag with our next class.Come lunchtime we felt inspired into producing numerous lesson plans and were soon heading out for afternoon class which we were told was a more informal session. We got there and were left, just us, 15 kids, no translator and an hour to fill!! An hour later, a door had been smashed down to get the cricket bats and Mike had succeeded in playing his first game of cricket on our travels!! However, the kids were very lively and had us panicking what to do with them the next day.

Today, we taught the kids the same alphabet lesson in the morning with vast improvements already (colours tomorrow, there's only so much 'a is for apple' we can take! ) and have started our brainwave of a photography project with our temple class in the afternoon which has gone down very well.We have been told we have no translator for our lessons as one cannot be found so we are really being put to the test!

We have had a fantastic couple of days after being totally dropped in at the deep end and now just need the sun to come out!!

I had better go let Mike out the squirrel cage now…

Emmaxxx