Monday to Wednesday were spent working with a group trying to write a programme proposal. VSO want to support pre-school education in one of the more remote areas in the north east of the country. On Monday we were discusing what is needed so ECE staff had been invited from 3 provinces to give their opinion. We had a marvellous man translating so if you spoke English he did an instant translation to Khmer and visa versa. I have to say he was by far the best I have worked with but it was still very difficult for him to grasp the meaning as well as the words. The funniest thing was that I would put the headphones on when the speaker was talking in English and then take them off when they spoke Khmer - everyone was doing the same so most of us lost the first part of every sentence!

Thursday and Friday were spent with over 30 people, 5 Dutch, 3 from different countries in Africa, one frenchman, 5 from the Philippines, and with the exception of me the rest were Cambodian. The whole meeting was in English and as usual we all had slightly different ideas of what was said.

I really enjoy these meetings and I have come to appreciate just how diverse we all are - good thing, no-one would want everyone to be like Trump. However I do think the world could have chosen a better language than English to be the international language. Just to confuse everyone English seems to have 5 words for the same thing and the same word can mean 50 things. This makes it a great language but very confusing when it is the meaning you really want others to understand rather than just the words.