Being at the orphanage is amazing. We have decided to stay for two weeks instead of just 10 days, mainly because the water feature isnt finished but also because we want to spend some more time with the kids.

We tend to get up about 9ish and have some breakfast of rice before heading to the orphanage for a couple of hours. The kids are up at 5am every day for their 'exercises', think zombie looking kids doing some stretching, and then head to school. So the morning tends to be chilled. They have their lunch at 11.30 and a lot of the kids then fall asleep. If you look around at the right point you will find kids everywhere. One sleeping in the tree house, one asleep in the classroom, four in the wendy house and a couple in the tuktuk! Very cute. The afternoon tends to be more fun with more games and football being done.

They also have a beauty room, designed to teach the girls a vocational skill, though lots of them want to go to university and become doctors. So every other day David will corner me and paint my nails a rainbow of horrific colours, horrendously done. But you just cant say no. As I write I have 9 silver finger nails and one orange, 7 black toe nails and 3 red! The girls also like to plait hair so I leave the orphanage most days with a plait of some kind. When the beauty room is opened up though the boys are the worst and spend hours preening their hair. This hasnt always worked out well though and David currently sports an awful hair cut courtesy of one of the other boy. A few tears were shed but he seems to be over it and it hasnt stopped him from going into the room so no mental scarring!

The afternoon is also spent reading english story books. Unfotunately these books do not get rotated all that often so I can almost recite about 5 books off by heart, but listening to the kids try to pronounce the english words can be hilarious, though obviously I am not laughing in their faces. Fox seems to be the one causing most problems at the moment. There is also one person who comes every afternoon for help with his english. I sat with him for an afternoon and was instructed that he wanted to learn grammar. That was all the direction given! So we decided to learn the past and future. It is amazing how hard it is to teach a language which you did not 'learn' in a formal environment. And I didnt realise how many of the words are irregular. A real pain in the arse. I think we made progress though.

Alex spends a lot of his time beating up the boys or playing football or volleyball, when he isnt digging anyway. Pretty standard really!

I spent one afternoon visitng the local village school which was amazing. One teacher and over 180 kids in a tiny room. Me and another girl arrived and were thrown in at the deep end, standing infront of the class teaching english. They use quite an old fashioned way of learning with a lot of group repetition but since pronounciation is so important and there are so many people in the class I guess there is no way around that. The teacher was amazing and so friendly.

The evenings are mainly for ourselves and everyone gathers at the centre for dinner. We then either watch a film, chat or play cards. We have met some amazing people and have really enjoyed our time here as much for the other other volunteers and for the volunteering. A couple of the evenings have been spent having a disco with the kids! A bizarre mix of western and khmer songs and some amazing dancing. I can dance as I want to and pretend that the reason it is so bad is that I am letting loose around the kids, they dont need to know that I always dance like that!