Mol goes to Cambodia

I've been home for about 24 hours now and I realised I never updated anything - most people know already, but I thought I might as well. The flight from Phnom Penh to Bangkok was just under an hour long, and then we spent about an hour and a half maybe two hours in the airport waiting to fly back to London. The first flight was hard - I think it hadn't properly hit me that we were leaving until then. I pressed publish on my previous blogpost literally as they were telling us to turn our phones on flight mode, and then seconds later we were going up into the air. And then I felt so gutted to be leaving - it was a real wrench. I spent most of that flight looking through photos and just feeling sad. We've come so far in the last few weeks - our work was going well, our relationships were only getting stronger. My host family and home were a haven from day one. Being away from my counterpart who I'd barely spent an hour or two away from in so long was hard to ...

I'm sat on the plane to Bangkok now - our first flight is one hour, our second is thirteen! Here's a quick summary of my day in pictures, because we're not far from taking off: Bike ride to the pagoda - Tim, Heng, Zaynab, Olivia, Tey and I cycled up to see the sunrise at 5.50 this morning. Last things at my amazing host home - last noodles for breakfast, cleaning our room, hanging out, last lunch, mast washing up, giving gifts. Goodbyes at the office -  The last things host mum gave me - more sweet potatoes. Airport stuff -  Next stop, Bangkok. Then on to London.  Truly gutted to be leaving. Beyond grateful for the experience and what I've learned. Choom reap liah Cambodia xxx

This morning Channa and I had a little photo shoot with our host family. Usually at the end of a cycle counterpart pairs have photos taken with their host families which are then given, framed, to the host family. We obviously don't get to do that now because of timings, so we got up a bit earlier this morning and took some photos:   After that Channa and I cycled off to the office for the last day of work. We needed to finish as much of the end of cycle paperwork as possible today - 3 and a half weeks early. This involved writing a handover report for each subteam so that the next cycle knows where to pick up. For Employability subteam Connor took that job on, and then Boray and Heng translated it. Zaynab, Tey and I, as the M and E subcommittee, had to write the debrief report which sums up our achievements this cycle. Writing it in a day was only achieved because we actually haven't done a lot of the surveys of various partners and stakeholders, so we...

Today we've spent time together all day. It's honestly been one of the best days so far. Now that we are all adjusting to the idea of leaving early, we're thinking about the things we're looking forward to getting home to (food, hot drinks, pets, family - just some examples). It is hard thinking about going back. We've found out we are booked to be flying out on Friday evening and will be back early Saturday morning - Mum has agreed to pick me up, which is kind. None of us quite know what we're going to walk into. We know we'll have to keep away from a lot of the people we'd be looking forward to seeing. We have been advised to self isolate for at least two weeks on arrival into the country, because of our international travel. It's strange thinking about not seeing each other every day as well. A lot of the good moments of today have been tinged with sadness because we know we have so little time left. This morning we all cycled down to the ri...