Introduction post

Ayubowan! This is my volunteer blog I'll be doing for SL Volunteers. My absolute minimum amount of post entries will be once a week (presumably on Fridays with longer posts), but my aim will be to update more frequently with shorter posts throughout the week when I have time to go to the extremely hot internet cafe. At the moment I don't know if there are insects crawling down my back or sweat drops. But I'll sweat over freeze anyday.

This will be brief as the cafe is closing shortly. Me and Robbie spent almost a week in Sri Lanka (Tue 20/7 - Sun 25/7) before the other volunteers arrived on Monday. We managed to visit Anuradhapura, Kandy, and Arugam Bay. Truly amazing country with such huge amount of variety for being so small (as big as Ireland).

The volunteering started on Wednesday after an introduction day to get to know each other (24 volunteers in total, everyone from Manchester with some sort of Psychology background) and we all have different projects. For me, I have varied mornings with elderly, disabled (both mentally and physically) and youth teaching depending on the day, and every afternoon at an all-boy orphanage. Only 16 of them, but they are crazy little rebels, not the easiest to control, but good kids anyway.

 The SL Volunteers

Everyone stays at different Sri Lankan families, in our house there are four, and our family is adorable, with 2 young boys who are hilarious.

This weekend (volunteer weekdays - weekends free) all volunteers went to a camping place in a rainforest close to Badulla. Some unexpected team building exercises and ridonculous waking-up hours awaited us, but it was good fun overall, with the highlight being trekking up a mountain on Sunday, and everyone got to know each other better after a few bottles of sweet, oh so sweet, Arrack on Saturday night. A part of the Sri Lankan Red Cross team was also at the camp and we all had a big camp fire and bbq and I had dance offs with Sri Lankans and whatnot, good times all around.


Need to go now, but so far so good. Especially:

• You eat food with your hands (however only the right one as the left one is the 'dirty' hand). It's amazing, like being a kid again. And the food is delicious
• Local transportation (buses, trains) is insane, but fun and cheap
• It's hot. Which means that everyone sweats. I sweat regardless of temperature, so it's nice to have company.

Bad stuff:

• It's extremely hard to control the boys at the orphanage sometimes. Today a kid broke a window by throwing a rock at it after a rage rampage. It was supposed to hit another kid, but I managed to make him throw it somewhere else. Unluckily the window got the hit. Hard to know what to do in those situations, but hopefully I will after these 6 weeks. 

Later.