Tuesday 26th July

Today was our first day of volunteering.  We started by having a quick lesson of the local language. Afterwards we headed to a local school via a bumpy road with an amazing views of the local mountain range. We were greeted by huge smiles, waves and lots of songs and dancing. After we introduced ourselves, we were shown some of their favourite big group games which were great fun. Then we spilt the children, whose ages ranged from approximately two to sixteen, into six groups and we did activities with them. There was more of a language barrier than we had expected so it was quite difficult to do some of the activities but they all enjoyed the more active games immensely. They especially liked the Polaroid camera as they were excited to see themselves and were fascinated  by how the photos were printed - even the people who work at fisherman's Rest loved it. The other job we did was to serve porridge to all the children. The length of the que emphasised the great work of the Goodwill project we were contributing to. It was an important job because the porridge might have been some of the children's only meals and encouraged them to keep coming back to school and were able to learn better as they had a full stomach. Feeling very satisfied after our tiring but enjoyable morning, we had our lunch overlooking the pool and mountains back at fishermens rest. We then walked over the Tilitonse community centre where we did much of the same as before. However, some of the Fishermen's Rest staff played music with a guitar-like instrument and drums and we participated in a not-so-friendly game of football with some of the boys. We then headed back to our lodge and wound down whilst waiting for Georgie and Julia to arrive with our locally sourced food. Julia did not disappoint and we had a lovely dinner of Chilli Con Carne!

Alice and Lucy