Time Flies

They say time flies... well we're already a week into October!! Lots of small things have happened this week: an enormous beauty of a moth and some bats to add to the wildlife count, and Jo is now known as Joyce. I write this whilst drinking a cup of lemongrass tea in an attempt to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and try to upload my video for Gunnersbury so I can email it to Julie. This is no mean feat on our painfully slow dongle-net. Joyce and I usually end up wanting to cry after using it for about half an hour. What did we do before the days of technology eh?!

One of class A has been in hospital this week, Nu Nu. She lives at the home with Pastor Henry. One and a half years ago she was diagnosed with a kidney condition which they have now discovered is a disorder of the immune system. I decided it would be nice to make her some cards and pictures so we did this in class on Thursday, it definitely highlighted once more the loveliness of class A! Pretty cards with nice messages inside, colourful pictures, a wordsearch containing all our names in the class (genius!) and some fun maths problems. I'm sure Nu Nu will now be kept very occupied during her recovery. She's out of hospital now but it's sad to know that she'll be having treatment for the rest of her life.

Back to the slow internet issue, apologies for the lack of pictures, there's no point even trying to upload any! I hope that my writing is gripping enough to keep you interested! Or you just carry on reading because you are nice.

Yesterday there was no school because there was another funeral in the community, the second since we've been here. This time it was a small baby of one and a half months. Very sad.

In the evening we went to the pub and met up with our regulars there, although there are always new people to meet. On this occasion - Kelvin, a 40 something year old man who likes to spontaneously burst into dance or song, particularly to Gangnam Style. He also seems to find Joyce a lot easier to say than Jo, hence the name change. Also his workmate, who had numerous specific English related questions for Jo and me. Much of the evening was spent trying to explain the difference between demand and remand. It would also seem that Mansu the police officer enjoys analysing people. After a less than polite analysis of Jo last week, tonight he told me that I have a heart of stone... but am also very romantic. I wonder where he gets all this immense wisdom from.

Today King took us to Samuel's house, about 15 minutes walk away. He is a teacher at the school and father of Esther and Mary, two of my students. They live in a nice house with their baby brother Benjamin, currently suffering from chicken pox, Samuel's wife and sister. They cooked us an amazing lunch of rice, noodles, coconut curry, fish, beef and vegetables. I've decided that I need to learn how to cook fish properly because this was delicious. On the way home we borrowed some umbrellas to protect us from the blazing heat and entertained King with some old-lady Joyce jokes.

Later we are going to visit the house of one of my favourite adult students, Nu Cing. She has some traditional Myanmar costumes for us to look at.