Our last day in school :(

Sorry we haven’t blogged much today, the wifi has been a bit rubbish and it’s not great now so if this post doesn’t make sense then it’s because of that and nothing at all to do with how tired we are!  It is also having trouble uploading these photographs so we’ll have to show you the rest when we get back.

Today was our last day with the Hastings children and we tried lots of the phonics games from the training that we did yesterday with the teachers.  We took Jen with us (you can see her in one of the photos) – she works at Derby University and she knows a lot about helping to teach people how to make their mouth actually say the right sounds to speak a foreign language.  Bengali speakers like our children have real difficulty making ‘c’ and ‘f’ sounds and they don’t have the ‘b’ and ‘d’ sounds so they sometimes struggle to tell the difference between them.

The children picked up the games very quickly and by the end of the morning we had got them making cvc words with magnetic letters and reading them.  They were very pleased with themselves and we were super proud of them too.

Then we blew up balloons and gave the children little gifts and had a bit of a party with them before we came home.  We were so sorry to say goodbye to them.  They are such brilliant children and we would love to bring them home with us to meet you because you’d love them too.  They asked us to sign their visitors book before we came away and we could see that they have only had four visitors all year since Miss Gill came last January so it’s no wonder they have found it all exciting this week.

When we came to Hastings on Tuesday there were some ladies with babies sitting on the pavement as we got out of the car and we gave them our lunches.  Today all the teachers we are with gave us their lunches to give away because the families at Hastings are so much poorer even than the slum schools they are working with.  I hope all our families had a feast with the sandwiches and cake after we’d gone!

After school our driver took us back to the Cathedral where the Relief Services office is.  We went to look at the Nari Dana Project which is a little workshop where they look after women who need to learn a skill so that they can work and earn some money.  Often girls don’t get to go to school here so they might not be able to read or write but they are learning how to make beautiful crafts that they can sell.  We also called in to see the young adults with learning difficulties who have a workshop behind the CRS office.  They were making candles and beautiful paper bags which are also sold and CRS make sure that the people who have made them get a fair price for them.

Before we had dinner we went to look around New Market.  It’s the most amazing place!  It’s a huge building that is full of tiny stalls all crammed in one after the other selling spices, sarees, jewellery, pots, bags and pretty much anything else you can think of.  It is very crowded and very noisy and quite smelly with all the stall holders shouting and trying to make you come and buy their wares.  There are even more stalls around the streets outside the building and it was very exciting, especially in the dark!

We have to be up early tomorrow because we’re going to see another project that Rig is setting up that is a couple of hours drive away.  Hope you are all okay-  love from us both, night night! xx