Party Day No bells rang until about 6.30am which was really quite late and no one was keen to get up and practice Bengali or go to keep fit classes with the children. I started my packing but it was a really halfhearted effort, I really didn’t want to admit that we were nearing the end of our trip. The morning was spent teaching staff from the school how to use the equipment we were leaving behind. The architect had come to see the builders and was teachi...

Presentation Day After all our hard work we had finally reached the day when our groups would perform their presentations to Anup and hopefully to some of the school governors. At assembly we told the groups that they had the opportunity to choose their costumes, although I think the regular school staff had a bit of a heads up on this as they brought all sorts of extra things in to supplement the costumes and displays. Mrs Mangar had brought a variety of jewe...

Following our long day in the Sunderbans Thursday got off to a slow start. Breakfast was quite late, as was lunch. We were working on the projects with the children from the school - my group were brilliant, Chilik had written a poem and the children had all learnt it whilst we had been out the day before. We were putting finishing touches onto the drama and song - with me practicing my rapping to Brian’s beatbox - never in a million years did I ever think I...

When Dan came back from his visit to the school last year he told us of a visit he had gone deep into the Sunderbans to visit the man who hosts David Attenborough’s teams when they film planet earth episodes about the Ganges Delta. Due to tales that Dan told about precarious boats over ladened with lorries, goats, motorbikes and too many people, and the fact that the native Bengali Tiger have rather a penchant for eating humans it was felt that the risk assessm...

The rest of tuesday afternoon was spent working on our projects. As the course of the visit went on more information about what were being expected to deliver in our projects leaked out. At the start we had thought that it could be either a song, or a poem, or a drama along with a display board and perhaps a talk. We started to realise that each group were expected to produce all four elements. This meant that Dan and I needed to spend time with one or two o...