Today a group of us went  to the Khulen mountains.  An amazing place that was the original mining site for many of Siem Reap's famous temples and is a sacred site for Cambodians.  We paddled in the waterfall

and found the river with 1000  lingas, sandstone  carvings dating back to the 11th century.

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On the way to the waterfall many of the stall holders were selling traditional medicines, mainly made of roots and tree bark.  


 This stall holder obviously sizes up her customers carefully.


 She is indicating  that  the large root on her left  is good for forgetfulness in the elderly

On my way to this evening's staff party to celebrate 6 years - before the Angkor beer

 

It has been cloudy  today but no rain and the humidity is high.   It was team games on the football pitch  for the little ones and a coach came to teach the lesson.

I nearly sat on this centipede, which was still very much alive even though it has somehow got completely tangled up in tape.  It must have been over six inches long and it gave me quite a shock.  A tasty dinner full of protein for someone no doubt.

It is bucketing down with rain at the moment - very big buckets of monsoon rain.  I managed to avoid the rain on my journey home  but it was very wet at school this afternoon

(Thank you Cathie Millar for the use of your photograph)

The children love to cool off under the waterfall from the drain overflowing in the picture below

Our Matisse inspired snails worked well and the children were  thrilled to show their work to the camera.

 I had failed to recognise before choosing the project that snails are an important part of the children's diet.

Hurray!   My camera was in school.  I MUST be more careful in future.



These photos were taken at 8.30am before start of this morning's lessons

The children easily understood today's simple addition and subtraction maths lesson so I will up the pace next week.  Art is on the time table for tomorrow and  after reading the story of The Whale and the Snail to fit in with the Journeys topic, we will  take inspiration from Matisse and make a collage snail from scraps of paper.  I have been tearing up colourful pages from old magazines and testing out the paper with glue to see if it sticks to the A4 sheets I found today.

Oh dear, perhaps sadly there will be no more photographs.  I took my camera to school today but came home without it.  It may or may not be there tomorrow.  Taking photos with my phone is easy but do  I have the right cable to download them on to the computer?  Help please!

It has been a wonderful, fulfilling day with the children.  Hopefully most of them  now understand left and right and they made some excellent maps of their journeys to school.  I was going to photograph one of their wonderful maps when  I discovered that I no longer had my camera.  When working in Nepal I always kept my camera looped to the  belt of my trousers.  Here it is too hot to wear a belt!

My journey to and from school by tuk-tuk takes about 20 minutes.  This afternoon we stopped at the photocopying machine on the way home so that I could give some number sheets out for tomorrow's maths lesson.  

Another National Holiday today so there was  no school but I spent the day on a very interesting child protection course.

Three of us were teachers and we joined a group of trainee Australian nurses to learn about the child protection responsiblities of volunteers who come here to help in Siem Reap.

There were some very interesting discussions about what is considered abuse by some, but others thought was acceptable behaviour.