25/1/2014 Saturday

Day off free time off to the Beach with the girls from the house seven of us. About an hour and a half by taxi. Geoffrey (probably not his Indonesian name) took us in his pimped people mover complete with boom box. Some of the music not bad but the rap wasn’t the best. I told him I like the Eagles so the selection was a bit more-easy listening on the way home. Nice little beach known as the Blue Lagoon managed to evade the local con men telling us the road was closed and trying to sell us boat rides to the same place. Great swimming we had our small swimming goggles and saw lots of fish. Home about 4.30pm.

26/1/14 – Sunday

Today we decided to have a rest day but we were invited by two other volunteers to join then on a trip to a UNESCO World Heritage site of terraced rice fields located closer to the middle of Bali. They were stunning to say the least.  We walked around them for about 1 -1/2 hours and saw them being ploughed in the traditional way with oxen and also being manually planted.  They have three harvests per year.

Monday & Tuesday

Our first days of teaching and what a shock, the children are very loud and over excitable.  They attend school in the afternoon free; to learn English at the same school and classes that their parents pay for them to attend in the morning to do curricular (I think) lessons. They are not allowed on the grass area as this is cordoned off, there is a lot of litter in the playground.  The classrooms are bare except for an old blackboard and a whiteboard.  Not a book or piece of equipment in sight or on site!  We take our own resources which we either buy or get from the Green Lion office.  Everything is very basic. No such suggestion of national standards, work plans, assessment or the likes, very minimal. We get driven to and from teaching each day by taxi by our translator/co-ordinator.  I am working with a secondary trained American lady called Stephanie and Jim works with a Slovakian lady called Lydia We are both lucky to work with such wonderful people. It is extremely hot each day as we work from 2pm to 5pm with NO air con!

Wednesday 29th January
A successful day at school. The children have settled down and they are some of the cutest children.  Their English is quite poor as they have learnt a lot of words by rote learning, but have difficulty constructing a sentence.  They are very good at maths and love addition & subtraction games as well as any other game or song we can think of without any equipment.  Never again will I complain about my consumables budget at school! At break time they all seem to have enough rupiah to buy iced tea in plastic bags & a straw to drink, it's loaded with sugar and a disaster for their teeth. As for the disposal of the plastic etc, it's just dropped  any where they please, there is so much rubbish around and they just don't understand the concept of recycling and not polluting.  It is a beautiful country, but many areas are spoiled by rubbish.