Last week I had a week off from my placement due to what Kelly calls 'the swiss invasion'. 15 people from switzerland were descending on the Indreni Ministry (where the day care is) for a week. They are apparently there to train the leaders of the children's progammes. This week there were 60 people camping out in the day care room and field meaning that the day care had to be closed. Unfortunately, it seems that they would not be training the women who run the day care to do more interesting activities with the kids.

Luckily there were 3 new people arriving on Monday. They can't start work until next week so it meant there were other people around most of the week and also gave me something to do showing them round. Two of them are a couple from Chester Uni. As part of their courses they get to do either a work placement or set up their own placement abroad. Jessica is studying religious studies and is meant to be writing an essay about Hinduism in schools (difficult as most Nepalis ew get contact with and most placements are christian). Ryan is studying management, I'm not sure if he has an aim here! The other new volunteer is Akit. He's from London and has finished a degree in natural science. Akit is very usefully teaching us how to make curry and use the spices here. Until he came we'd been eating very bland food.

All the new volunteers and Saskia have gone off to Chitwan this weekend, leaving just me and Fleur again. It seems very quiet, I've really enjoyed being a big group again. Yesterday Fleur and I did pony trekking. It was a little boring as they juts took us along the road that goes round the lake. We had a quide on foot and very stubborn ponies so we couldn't even trot! The view was only what we've seen before. It was ok though, something to do. In the afternoon we tried to visit the Gurkha museum. We found a taxi to go there, the driver didn't seem too sure where we meant but he said he's take us. First he took us to the Internation Mountain Museum (a very good musuem that we visited last week), when we told him it wasn't that one ('hoina!', his english wasn't too good) he took us to the Pokhara Regional Museum (I've heard it's not very good). Finally he did manage to find the Gurkha museum. It was interesting, had some artefacts, lots of photos and some stories of immense bravery of Gurkhas since the early 19th century and through both world wars. Our taxi driver home was little better, he took us the long way round to Lakeside and then missed out turning! We don't ususally have such trouble with taxi drivers!

The others are back today then tomorrow I'm back to work, although only for a couple of weeks before I finish.