Things are looking brighter now that I have briefly received my programme and thankfully the cockroaches seem to have gone into hiding since I sprayed my deodorant everywhere, legend! Lizards have become our pets, we actually call them Fred, don't ask why! The boarders are bombarding our rooms, they make it obvious that they want to come into our room by hanging around outside our room. Recently wondered why the girls' dorm have pretty flower names above their door whereas our room had 'STOR' with capital letters, looked up in the Malay dictionary to find that it was previously a storage room! No wonder why it was so dusty in there. Puan Marie (the headmistress) requests me to pay more attention to the deaf kids as there are plenty of English teachers in the school, although I will be helping Kirsty out in the English department on speaking skills every opportunity I can grab, want to keep myself occupied! Johnston (English teacher) helped with getting our icy cold shower fixed, got us a toaster and plates and knifes, which are all a huge help. We're actually having a real breakfast now, toast and butter, actually heaven! Puan Julie and Fiona have warned us about sleazy Ramzie, told us a few truths about that seedy guy who is 'supposedly ' supposed to be our mentor but it turns out that he offered to pick us up on the first day. The previous gappers, Jess and Rachel filed a complaint about Ramzie last year as he was clearly after one thing when he drove them to Sarawak! Explained why we got funny looks from the kids when he showed us around the school. Steering well clear of him now *shrugs* To answer a few of your questions that I have had, the deaf students are mute which makes it a bit hard for me seeing that lip pattern helps but I'll eventually pick it up. The head of the deaf department who can speak English gave me a list of tasks to do with the deaf kids starting on Monday and several of them were unexpected. For instance, to help one girl who is the only one that can speak very little to work on her speech, there was me thinking 'I'm not a speech therapist' but I think they got the impression that I'm capable of that. Explained that I can't do that but they want me to give it a go *nervous chuckle*. Puan Marie notified me that the deaf students have very weak English and wants me to help them with their sentences, even teach them SSE (Supported Sign English)! The head of the department also invited me to meet up with what she called the "working deaf", in KK next Sunday which should be interesting. I also have the control to organize outings amongst the deaf students, have to grant permission from the Education department first, so got to come up with ideas. The deaf kids wondered where I would be allocated to and I told them 'Most of the time with you', they all jumped up and down and went 'YES!' Bless their cotton socks! The hearing kids know Bahasa sign language which is impressive, so it is hard to tell who is deaf and who is hearing as they communicate to one another in the same way (being mute) and the deaf kids do not wear hearing aids. That night we chatted to the girls in the dorm next to us. We invited a few of them into our room to look at our pictures of home and we gave them some shortbread that Kirsty brought with from Scotland. One confident girl Meitza (sounds like Meesha), has very good English and is so chatty. They said that they had something to tell us but they couldn't say what it was while it was dark. But after much persuasion, we got it out of them, there's supposedly a headless ghost that haunts the hostel and is after female blood. *Chuckles fondly*, reminds me of Mary Hare days when we came up with all sorts about Bloody Mary and the invisible horse! Kirsty and I thought, fair enough, kids are bound to come up amusing stories like that but then we discovered that the matron and headmistress took the "incidents" really seriously, resulting in the girls having to all sleep with their lights on and they all have to do bizarre rituals before they go to bed, peculiar! The girls and boys dorms were even swapped two years ago to try and avoid the ghost. Meesha said that last year, when an "incident" occurred, they went through to the Gappers rooms to spend the night. So we're thinking maybe it's just a plot to crash in our room, we'll see. Meesha's originally from South Sabah and kindly filled us in on some local headhunting stories. Supposedly, where she's from, when a bridge is built, 100 heads are collected and put on spears under the bridge to ensure it will stay up. She also said that in 2003, kids from Sabah were kidnapped for their heads and there was a huge hoo ha on the news about it. Luckily we didn't realize it was Friday 13th when we were chatting about all this. Next day, Rakema (the warden), invited us to go to a University with her and we obviously agreed although we hadn't had the faintest idea what it was about. Arrived to discover it was an Environmental Awareness competition. It turned out we won, the kids went fanatical. They played "Crazy Frog" full blast to celebrate, they love Crazy Frog here and play "Black Eyed Peas" NON STOP!!! That's all for now! X