One month down, eleven to go! This first month here has been absolutely insane! So much has happened in such a short period of time I can barely believe it. It has mainly been filled with travelling, sorting out visas and a fair bit of illness. There have been so many funny moments throughout this first month, mainly because of the lack of English spoken at our school. An example of this would be when our head nun pointed at my face one day and said ‘No Fresh’ repeatedly. I was a bit confused by this and started to take it as an insult. After a while of asking what she meant I worked out that she was saying that I was looking tired. I think this is what she was trying to say, but honestly I still have no idea!! The following days she continued to repeat this phrase, until one morning when she pointed at me and said ‘Eleanor! Fresh!’ this was a very happy moment for me as I no longer felt insulted!!

At the start of the month I was finding it hard to adjust to the food that they cook for us here. It is a strange mix of Asian food piled together into one, this is quite nice as it creates a variety of food for us to eat. But it was something that I am not used to, so for my stomach to slowly get used to the food I decided to only eat rice. This was a testing time… I had never eaten so much rice in such a short period of time. It was quite tough though because the nuns who cook for us kept saying to me ‘many eat, many eat!’ in both English and Burmese. I really didn’t want to seem rude so continued eating (a very bad idea) but when I wouldn’t eat any of the side dishes the nuns looked at me and said ‘is the food bad?’ to which I tired my hardest to explain that it wasn’t and that my stomach just couldn’t handle it! Luckily now I am much more used to the food, even though it did take me some time to get over the rice for breakfast thing! One dinner time when the nuns asked us what we eat in England, they all found it hilarious when we told them that usually we’d only have rice once a week or so and here we are having it three times a day, every day!! The day after this conversation, for breakfast they cooked us toast – as we had described that was a common breakfast food in England – it was so incredibly nice of them! But it wasn’t toast like you know it… it was brioche bread toasted with spots of oil they had dabbed on and a large sprinkle of sugar over it! Actually very nice, and it was so kind of them to make us feel like home through the use of toast.

Teaching here has certainly been an experience… Since the moment we got here we were thrown into teaching lessons. And as two 18 year olds who have never taught a class of young children in their lives this was slightly scary, especially when we were told to teach English lessons to the children when we had no time to plan. This causing some rather crazy lessons which were very much made up on the spot! As the month has gone on we have learnt how to plan a lesson and how to instantly throw away said plan when the kids have already learnt the topic! Teaching is defiantly getting better as we go on, but some days are good teaching days and others aren’t and that’s fine. In my Kindergarten class there is only 4 of them, all novice nuns who are insanely adorable but rather crazy. One lesson I thought it would be fun to take them to the small stupas outside the classroom to teach them the alphabet. However this was not a good idea as the teachers who watch over our lessons could not see me or the kids. These cheeky kindergartners knew this as well, so took this chance to mess around. Long story short it was a chaos of a lesson where two of the children cried, one ran off with the colouring pencils and the other bit me! Since then, my kindergarten lesson have not left the classroom and there has not been an incident like that since!

Notable moments:

• When we first arrived, Mi Mi Gyee (our country representative) was showing us the school and our accommodation for the year. When we got into said accommodation Mi Mi Gyee told us in a hushed voice to always make sure that we used a lock on our door whenever we go out, even if we are just sitting on the bench outside. She then explained that we must do this because of ‘The Men’. Me and Clara sat there looking very confused. Mi Mi Gyee went on to say how that the builders who are currently working on the site of the school could be dodgy, so each time we get home we should check under the beds, behind the doors and in the bathroom for ‘The Men’. When she left us to unpack, we both sat there for a good minute thinking how we were never warned about ‘The Men’ before and never considered it as a notable issue. After this warning, we were ever so slightly scared but both found it a little bit funny and began to make a joke out of it by saying to each other ‘oh, have you checked for ‘The Men’?’ when walking into the house. So far we have yet to encounter any men hiding under our beds, so I think that’s a win?!
• Myanmar has many insects floating around which do not appear in England. So seeing a large luminous green bug flying at you for the first time is slightly scary! However, the one insect which we do also have in England is Ants. These have become some of the most annoying creatures on earth to us. In the past month they have somehow been able to crawl into our sealed fridge, swarm our shared bedside table and invade our washing line. One morning when putting out freshly washed clothes onto the line to dry, I spotted a line of ants crawl up one of the poles holding our washing line up and then onto the green rope from which we were hanging our clothes. At that point we realised how the phrase ‘ants in your pants’ might become a reality… we quickly shoved our clothes away from the ants and the pole they had climbed up, hoping that the ants really don’t, get in our pants!!
• We are only the second set of volunteers at this project in Mingun, we are also the first girls to come to this project. This has caused our principle and head nun to be quite protective of us. For example, on the week when Clara was ill I taught all our lessons by myself. By the end of the week I was feeling quite tired and ready for the weekend. On the last day of school, I was told at lunch by the head nun that at 4 (when school finishes) we would go to one of the local monks 55^th birthday party. I cannot explain the excitement this filled me with! Having not left the school all week I was looking forward to getting out, eating some free food and having awkward conversations with the locals. So, once my lesson was finished I rushed home, told Clara (who was feeling much better by this point) that we are going to a birthday party whilst putting on a nice longyi (the local dress here – very similar to a long wrap around skirt) and throwing my uniform to the side. We found the other teachers and began to walk out of the school. I kid you not, we didn’t walk 5 steps outside the school gates before we got stopped and told ‘Please wait’ – a phrase we here around here very, very often! The head nun had just received a call from our principle saying that the birthday party was ‘too loud’ and ‘too busy’ for us. We think the fact that Clara being ill for the past week might have made this decision, but even when Clara repeatedly said she was okay and happy to go, we were still told that we could not go. I was absolutely crushed not to get out of the school compound, so as we walked back Clara comforted me and suggested playing a game of cards instead!

I think that’s about it for this month, it has been a tough first month getting used to life here as absolutely everything is different in comparison to England. It has defiantly not been plain sailing as we have been facing new challenges everyday which is ridiculously exhausting. But each day is getting ever so slightly easier so we have been enjoying life here more and more! Right I must go now and clean our bathroom!

P.S. We are actually much closer to the two month mark now so this blog is rather late! Apologies for the delay!