Reading and thinking to read the blog entries by je, as you read underlying the parts of the text, you read slowly, then compare your reading pace . with a partner volunteering in the bush eight of march, I just got a parcel from home. I took about two weeks to arrive and IT was a bit damaged, but I was so nice to get some sweets and jam from home. I've been dying to have some of my favourite sweets, and it's always nice to get mail. So i've been here in the jungle for about a month now. My secondary school is a bush school. The classrooms are made of bamboo with clay floors and roofs of grass. IT takes me only a few minutes to walk to school down a dusty track covered in weeds. When I reached the school grounds, i'm greeted by a course of good morning from the boys. Unlike students in our country, these boys do not wear cotton uniforms, and many of them also have to walk a long way, sometimes for up to two hours, just to get to school. There is no electricity, running water or even textbooks, not to mention laptops, tablets or other modern devices. All the students have are pencils, rubbers and paper. I'm still trying to adapt these conditions. I've had to become much more. Imagine if in my teaching, science is my most chAllenging subject, as my students have no concept of doing experiments, there is no equipment, and since there isn't even a washroom, if I need water, I have to Carry IT from my house in a base. It's important not to be too rigid at about rules here too. The other day, I was showing the boy's a chemistry experiment when, before I knew IT, the mixture was bubbling out of the test tubes, spilling everywhere. The class became a circus as the boys who had never come across anything like this before started jumping out of the windows. Sometimes I wonder how relevant chemistry is to these students. Few will ever become chemists, and most will be going back to their villages after year eight. Anyway, to be honest, I doubt whether i'm making any difference to these boy's lives at all. Seventeenth of April last weekend, I made my first visit to a remote village home to one of our students, toe, another teacher, and I walked for two and a half hours to get there. First up a mountain from where we had fantastic views, and then down the shaded path to the valley below. When we arrived at the village, tom's mother, kayak, saw us coming and started crying. We shook hands with all the villagers. Everyone seemed to be related to tome thom's father, new cap, a man with a strong jar and a wrinkled forehead let us to his house, a low round bamboo hut with no windows, with the door just big enough to get through, and with grass sticking out of the roof. This shows IT is a man's house. Such housing is dark inside. So IT took time for our eyes to adjust. Fresh grass had been laid on the floor, and there was a platform for Jenny immediately be born. There was a fireplace in the center of the hut. The only possessions I could see were one broom, a few saucers, a cattle cups, pants and a couple of jars. Milk p. Built a fire outside and lead stones on IT to heat. He then placed the hot stones in an empty oil drum with cow, cow, sweet potato, ripe corn and Greens. He then covered the vegetables with banana leaves and left them to steam IT smell delicious. We ate inside the hut, sitting around the fire. I loved listening to the family talking softly to each other in their language, even though I could not participate much in the conversation locally. Toe interpreted for us. Later, I noticed a can standing upside down on the grill over the fire. After a while, tom threw IT out of the doorway. Tom told me that the can was heated to dry out the left over food. His family believes that leftover attract bad spirits in the night, so any leftover food is dried up in a can, and the can is then thrown out of the hut. We left the village the next morning, after many goodbyes in firm handshakes, my muscles were aching and my knees shaking as we dragged ourselves down the mountain towards home that evening, I felt happily into bed. IT was such a privilege to have spent a day with thom's family.