the first part of the project is painting a new building of a school (the other buildings are also undecorated, just concrete walls etc but you have to start somewhere...). it's going well so far. we have sandpapered, primed and painted the whole exterior and just got started with the primer on the first classroom today. loads of kids come to help even though they're on their holidays which i was really impressed by. at the start we would have preferred to have done it ourselves as controlling the kids was impossible and they were wasting quite a bit of the materials we have bought but we realised this is as much a community project as much as anything. although the vast majority of children join school the teaching is poor and often exams are set on material which is only taught in private tutition classes. that results in the majority being forced to repeat years and their parents thinking their children aren't smart and withdrawing them from school. the project is meant to instill a bit of pride in them and their school and encourage them to stay on. they have done an amazing amount of work on the building, incluiding things that we would never allow kids at home to do... kids sitting on beams on the roof and hanging out of windows to get awkward angles painted!!
We are organising sports every afternoon next week (more painting in the morning followed by lunch then sports). I'm not sure how it is going to work as the ground isn't very suitable but that's what the director and the NGO want us to do.. they don't have any sports or art etc in school and i imagine their lives would be fairly mundane so it will be a brilliant week for them - i'm just not quite sure yet how we're going to pull it off!
we're hoping to go and see angkor wat tonight and tomorro. it is very overcast and windy at the minute so we'll see how the weather is in a few hours. it'll also be interesting to see how we're feeling later - its our first weekend since starting the project so feel like we should make use of it especially since from now on we won't have afternoons off but we get up at 6am and are normally in bed at 9.30 so we'll probably be knackered!
