Thursday 8 July 2010

Traveling to Chai Thom Village

We had a "late" start today - getting up at 6. After a breakfast, taking down hamocs and an hour of chilling out, it was back on the Hummer to head off to the next village.

It was only about a twenty minute journey to get there, although there seemed to be masses of overhanging branches trying to knock us out of the back of the truck.
As we drove into the village, the people were very curious of us. They watched from the raised houses as we unloaded our kit onto our own raised house, which will be our home for the next few days.

The village is a lot more basic than the last, it has no shops or ice coffee, just a lot of animals. Tom made the very true comment, that it is weird to think that our garden sheds would appear like luxury mansions compared to the buildings in this village.

After setting up our hamocs and getting settled in, while the children cautiously watched us from the bottom of the platform, we went and had lunch over in the small hut that is the community centre. We all fell asleep for a bit on the floor of the centre after lunch, being seriously exhausted after the last few days.

After a few games of cards back at our sleeping hut, it was 3 o'clock and Chris took us to see the PGS school that is being built here. At the moment, the foundations are just being laid and there was a fair bit of soil shifting to be done, so we all chipped in and got dirty; doing our part towards the building.

After about 90minutes of earth works, we returned exhausted to the village centre, collected our towels and wash stuff and went straight to the stream to wash.

The stream was literally a small bamboo pipe with water flowing out, and washing was throwing buckets over ourselves; we didn't care though, we were just grateful to be "clean".

Now we are back at camp, diary writing and waiting for dinner. It has been a chilled out day with some moments of intense exercise. We are all really bonding as a team though and feel ready to try and teach the very frightened but curious children tomorrow.

An exciting and great day; bring on the challenges of tomorrow! Loving the "jungle"!

No comments:

Post a Comment