Advertisement
Published: March 27th 2007
Hiya everyone. Hope everything is all ok at home.
So I have finally reached a computer after almost a month of rouhging it out with not so much as even a toilet. So since I wrote last I met up with Raleigh (the program I'm on) and they took us to jungle camp. There we were divided into alpha groups who we would spend the phase with. I got an AMAZING group and we all got along really well. At jungle camp all we seemed to do is jump in the river every hour on the hour to cool off from the blistering heat! We did training - navagation, first aid, river crossing, jungle training.
After 5 days of getting to know each other we finally headed off to our project site. Somehow I got incredibley lucky and got the BEST POSSIBLE community project. We went to a little tropical island called mantanani island. There we were to be building a library for the worst performing primary school in all of malaysia. When we got there I couldn't believe it...there were tropical waters, palm trees, white sand , incredible sun, and ....cows...and chickens? Yes thats right..cows and chickens roam the island freely in large numbers. Even so this place looked like paradise.
Where we stayed was the town community hall which wasn't excalty paradise. It was covered in cow crap, and it was RIGHT beside this mosque which blared out chants at 4 30 in the morning ( sounded like someone dying but in a musiclal fashion.) We soon made it incredibly homely though. We were aloud to make it homely because we ended up not being aloud to work on the library for 2 and a half weeks! All because the headmaster thought it would look really bad on his part if his school needs charity help to help his school. But I wasn't complaining at the lack of work on this tropical island! We spent many days fixing up our home, going to beach to tan, swim, boat trips around the island.
A bit about the people. This is an island of about 200 and everyone there was either really young or really old...Nobody there was from 15-40 years old. At first they were very cold to us. I think it was because it was a shock to see white people. But the kids really took a taking to us after a couple of days. They would follow us around all the time. I felt like a celebrity. We would throw them in the water for hours, we had a sports day for them which was really fun, and they even helped us when we did find work to do. Now there were 2 people who were about 18 on that island...and the only reason they were there was because they were glue sniffers...funny stories about that but im running out of time on my internet now ahhh
anyways we had a blast for 2 and a half weeks until we finally got the ok to build the library. That was when we realized that we don't know how to bulild a library. By now the locals had warmed up to us and they looked at the plans and then got us all doing what needed to be done at a amazing pace. WE COMPLETED 3 WEEKS WORTH OF WORK IN 3 DAYS...!!! We actually did more than was excpected of us!!!
So after 3 weeks I am now at Borneo paradise...A HOTEL WITH BEDS AND REAL FOOD, AND A TOILET. never taking these things for granted again. Kinda sad because now our group is getting split up and Ill be in a new group shortly and doing something new...
anyways im more than out of time for my internet use. Thanks for the messages good to hear them and ill cram as much as I can in another 3 weeks time!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.106s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 10; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0717s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Mum
non-member comment
Golden Boy Stikes Again:)
Sorry I missed your call and you had to speak to your brother! (I was walking YOUR dog! Hey, you must be the luckiest guy around!!! It sounds like you were in heaven/paradise! No work, lazing around, that's not what you signed up for now, is it, and there we are thinking you'd be slumming it ... no pity from us now! So, wondering what new project you'll be doing now, whatever it is, I hope you and your new team will have a great time:) Dad is in Bar-bloody-bados again, you are in paradise, me and David in Ditchmond ... not fair! Take care, lots of love, miss ya :)))))) Mum XoXoXoXo