After a restless night which involved moving everyone inside at 12:00 am due to the rain, we woke up this morning feeling much better, yet again Trigg was the last up even though he was the first to bed, and with 14 hours sleep in total over the 2 days. The cook team which includes Yelland, Connie, Ben and Zoe were up at 5:00 am making a ‘lovely’ curry for breakfast. After showers were finished and stuff tidied up, we head to the school to be greeted with a marching band, line up of entire school (nearly 1000 in total) and kids running in all directions! We had an hour long assembly which included many Sri Lankan dances an introduction to the school. Weydon played their part as they explained the differences in Culture, School, Food and Clothes. Then we got to meet our buddies. With small talk at first we managed to get into a proper conversation as we got a tour of Tzu-Chi. This included a dance lesson where we learnt the first four steps of one of the many Sri Lankan Dances. Next it was our turn and the melon of the group (Yelland) decided to teach the Sri Lankan school children the ‘Macarena’?! The Tzu-Chi students thoroughly enjoyed it (especially the bum ‘twerk’ at the end). Our buddies then had to leave us to do their 2 hour english exam in which we headed back to the house and had our first period of down time since we got there. After around 3 hours the buddies turned up to the house to be greeted with gifts; from footballs to loom bands to sweets to … Yelland they all thoroughly enjoyed the generosity. After a bonding session of sharing stories the boys split off to play football leaving the girls to play with their loom bands and paint their easter eggs. It got to 5:00 pm and the buddies had to go leaving the group to visit a ceramics workshop in which we got to make our own bowls for the women to fire later. There was also an ‘elephant hide’ where the locals sat and waited for elephants. It wasn’t the sturdiest of structures but we all had a go at climbing it. After getting back and showered and just hung around writing a blog. See you tomorrow.
