So what have we been doing since we arrived in Cambodia? Well we left our rather grotty hotel room in Phnom Penh and took an early morning mini-bus ride to Kratie, a town to the east of Cambodia along the bank's of the Mekong flowing down from Laos. Kratie is famous for its fresh water river dolphins, something we have decided not to go see as the water is very brown and only the humps of the river dolphins are visible in the murky water.
We are in Kratie to help our friend Yuth teach English to the local children. Cambodia is a developing country and the local people are very poor and welcome any kind of assistance from abroad. The school is held in open air under the teachers accommodation in the evening. The children go to the local school and then come for the English lesson after. They are saving up donations to build a proper classroom for the children, which I hope will happen soon as the mosquitoes start to bite as the sun goes down!

The children's ages range from 2 to 18 and they are so grateful to have foreign teachers, however they are very cheeky and quite a handful. Some cannot even spell their name in Cambodian but they struggle hard to learn English knowing they can get a better job working with tourists.
We were also asked to take a class at the local school in Kratie, so we go their everyday on the scooter provided, to teach the local high school children. It can sometimes be difficult to teach the children as there are few resources available and they only have a couple of student books and no teachers books. This means we have to be very inventive when creating our lesson plans. There is access to the internet, but no computers or tablets yet (they hope that someone will donate these in the future). Despite these difficulties the children are very inventive at entertaining themselves playing marbles or skipping with old rope. There is a lot of rubbish lying around and along the streets and the local children play amongst it. Life is definitely a struggle here, but people are trying to rise above it. There are lots of building works all around us with great piles of sand and agregate being mixed into cement. The newer concrete buildings contrast strongly with the traditional wooden stilted buildings and the corrugated rusting lean-to huts alonside the estuary.

We have been riding the school scooter and pushbikes around the town and every few moments we have to wave or reply to people shouting 'hello', 'what's your name?' every few yards! Everyone is very friendly and curious about us strange westerners and our habits. They think us very funny in the market when we are buying our vegetables and keeping adding bits of herb etc to our shopping as they try to understand what we are cooking. So far our diet has been mostly veg and eggs supplemented by waffles cooked in the local market for breakfast. Luckily there is local hotel that cooks good western food and has a swimming pool, so we are able to relax and enjoy a bit of 'me' time between classes. Our time here ends in a couple of days and we are off to Siem Reap to visit the temples of Ankor Wat before travelling to Luang Prabang in Laos.