First Update

Apologies for the lack of posts this week, we only arrived on Tuesday and struggled to get hold of any Internet connection. We arrived in Maldives airport on Tuesday morning, full of energy after a cracking point against France and a flight on an Airbus!  As we arrived we were told we had been booked onto a seaplane to take us over to our island. The views on the 45-minute journey were incredible as we flew over 100’s of islands, both populated and deserted. After a quick speedboat ride we reached our island Lhohee, and moved into our temporary accommodation. All the houses on the island are very basic, with poor hygiene facilities. Hopefully we shall be moving tonight, as a special 2-storey guesthouse has been built for volunteers, which appears to be considerably nicer than where we are staying currently. All the food is provided for us in a local café, which offers rice and noodles with the occasional curry, with a friendly but slightly crazy atmosphere provided by Café owner Ahmed aka Jet. Nice added bonus to the café was the 2-metre projector screen that shows the Euros every night, though all the locals seem to be supporting France, Germany and strangely enough last night Sweden! The locals seem to be treating us like celebrities with children camped outside our house constantly and friendly greeting from all the locals. Every morning at 6 we play football with the kids, and we are hoping to start our English teaching program tomorrow! The majority of  locals speak a poor standard of English, but some do show occasional fluency.

The beaches and the landscape on the island are incredible, with coral reefs providing excellent snorkeling opportunities and over the last few days Pash and Fretters have spotted many a fish, turtles and even a stingray. There are lots of mosquitoes about but thankfully they have avoided me so far and chosen to feast on Pash instead. Over the week ive been compared to Shane Warne and David Beckham by the locals, which are somewhat (very) optimistic comparisons, however Colly’s comparison to Wayne Rooney is a great shout! Everything is very cheap with bottles of Fanta and Coke costing around 35p, and big bottles of water even less. We visited the local Police station on the capital island today which could not have been more different to England, with guards relaxing in Hammocks and 50 inch plasma screens with PES 2012 on, and surround sound; the kind of Police life I imagine Paul expects. Hoping to get another post done in the next few days to talk about the football and English programmes we will have started this week.

Dodge