Tuesday 9th January 2024

It was a pretty full-on day of teaching today, as I took on the training of the Trainee Teachers, which included Finance Officers and Outreach Workers from Tea Leaf Nuwara Eliya Centre and the new Tea Leaf Pussellawa Centre. I was meant to be doing this jointly with Miss Madona, the new Principal of Tea Leaf Centre Nuwara Eliya, but she has a serious ongoing eye infection, which was clearly badly affecting her, so I ended up taking the lead.

It was great to be in a teaching situation once again, as that was how I spent most of my working life, so it comes very naturally to me, and I enjoy it very much. I struggled a little with some of the content, as it wasn't always entirely clear to me what I was supposed to be doing, because there had been such little preparation time beforehand, and I must admit that I was pretty exhausted by 15:00, as I did retire over 8 years ago now!

It was such a lovely group of people to work with though, and they participated in each session so well. The space that they have at Tea Leaf Centre Nuwara Eliya is fabulous, although they do have to share it with a few pigeons. There are so many places that the pigeons can get in that you simply cannot avoid keep them out, and they fly around regardless. It is worse in the more enclosed spaces like the staff room, where they end up feeling more trapped in.

I went straight from teaching a full day at the school to travelling by tuk-tuk to Sky Heaven for a chat over a cup of tea with Stephanie about her programme schedule, and we then waited to welcome Isabelle, a new French volunteer. I have been chatting to Isabelle fairly regularly since she first expressed an interest in coming out to work with Tea Leaf Trust, and it was such a pleasure to welcome her to stay at such excellent volunteer accommodation.

Today's photos show the training session and the troublesome pigeons!








Comments

  1. peter HopwoodJanuary 10, 2024 at 4:56 AM

    Glad to hear you are back in harness and enjoying it so much. Everyone looks well wrapped up and even the pigeons seem to prefer life indoors: what's the temperature there at present?

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJanuary 11, 2024 at 2:33 AM

    Good to see you settled in well, and up to your ears in working as usual. I liked the welcome banner across your window. A great demonstration of how much the work you are doing is appreciated.
    Gerry

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tuesday 4th March 2025

Image
I finally got to my last day here which started very early, as I was up at the crack of dawn to sort out a few things in the apartment, then get my last few bits of packing done. Razeena once again brought me breakfast, which was a great start to my day. After breakfast, I popped a present for Sandra in Ravi's office, just in case I didn't see her to say goodbye to her but then met her at the Junior School on my way back and said a fond farewell to her there. I left at 08:30, with Liyanage driving me to the airport - not that I was aware of that journey, because I had got up so early this morning that I nodded off for most of it. I hardly had to queue at all for either the security checks or for check-in, so I had quite a bit of time before my flight was due to take off at 12:50. I had a delicious, filled croissant for lunch, with a latte, then went to Gate 9, where I didn't have to wait too long before boarding the plane, which thankfully took off on time. It was an 11-hou...
Read more

Friday 1st November 2024

Image
There was no school again today, as the staff were out on a staff trip somewhere (not sure where they went), so we had breakfast a little later at 08:30, then did some washing before heading into school at 10:30 to do some planning and preparation for our Maths Staff Training session on differentiation, which is taking place after school on Monday. There are 53 staff coming we have been told - across Grades 1 to 5, so I think it will be pretty challenging for us! Having got as far as we could with the planning and preparation, we went shopping for some Maths resources Valerie needed to purchase, plus a little trip to Halal Bakers to buy some bread for breakfast tomorrow. The street shops are an amazing concoction of buildings with all kinds of trades going on within them, and on the extremely busy Kurunegala to Kandy road, so Valerie took some photographs of the local shops, which you will see below today. We got back to the apartment, and I got on with planning out the Maths Staff Tra...
Read more

Saturday 5th October 2024

Image
It's my fifth trip to Sri Lanka, but on this occasion I am at last joined by my wife, Valerie, and it will be lovely not to be on my own this time. We flew out of London Heathrow Airport one hour late at 22:30 UK time on Friday, and after a rather excruciating eleven hour flight, we eventually landed at Colombo Airport just after 13:30 Sri Lankan time on Saturday. I slept for a few hours on the journey, but Valerie struggled to get any sleep at all. Sandra Wanduragala met us at Colombo Airport, and we drove into Colombo for a couple of hours - meeting up with her daughter, Selena, at the Good Market, which we really enjoyed and would love to go back to. We then went back to Selena's home, where it was good to be able to freshen up a little bit, and enjoy a nice cup of tea, before our driver, Rohan drove us to Kurunegala, where we will be based for the next two months. Arriving in Kurunegala, we met up with my good friend Tharika and her daughter, Evinka, to have dinner at Sri B...
Read more