Calm day

Today I've felt more like myself than I have in a while.

The last few days I've either been sick or just emotionally in a kind of low point. And morale has been low, because a lot of the In Country Orientation training last week felt quite repetitive in comparison to what we did in Pre-Placement training in November. And then this week our In Communitry Orientation started to feel the same again. But today we've been doing some planning in our subteams to do with what we will be helping the local youth groups with, and reading over the work that past cycles have done. Tomorrow we should be able to meet with some of the leaders of the youth groups (I say should because things like this are a bit less reliable than in the UK - we were meant to meet them today).

After the day finished at the office, we went and cycled to the rice fields at the south west end of Srae Thmei and watched the sunset:
 Boray, Sokmeng, Me, Alex and Chealy
Me and Alex

Connor and Tim (pink in the centre distance is Olivia)
Alex
Tim


After that it was just a case of going home with Channa and eating with our host family. They are so nice! I feel very blessed. 

A few of the host homes are owned by people with shops on the main road, which means that the vols staying there don't get to interact with the host family much, or it's very noisy. My host parents are 30 and 32, the children are lovely, as is the wider family, and they are very chill. They know a few words of english, which is really nice as well. The evenings are lovely because it's so much cooler, and we just sit and chat underneath the stilted part of the house. When I don't understand the conversation, I like watching the lizards catching flies:

There are so many lizards, and they chirp at each other a lot. I didn't know lizards could be so loud! They're only about 5 inches long or less! Apparently they are Common House Geckos, according to the internet.

Retrei susdei!



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