Sunday 15 January

Theoretical Day Off

Theoretically a day off, but I still land up doing lots of work, and the promised and much-anticipated massage treat never takes place, as there just doesn't seem to be enough time in the day. Hey ho! Lucky I enjoy working!

I wake at 5.00 and catch the last 5 days of diary up to date and send them off to David, Children's World's webmaster, in England. A chance to catch up with all the emails too.

Crystal Ball Paul

Crystal Ball Paul shows us his act - it's very pretty - he starts with just one acryllic crystal ball and progresses up to 6, manipulating them smoothly in different configurations. We decide to set it to Jean Michel Jarre's "The Dragon" - though at 4 minutes and 15 seconds that may be a bit too long to hold the younger children's attention, as, though it is really very pretty, it is a slow-moving piece. We'll see!

To establish all the performers, and their characters at the beginning of the show, they devise a movement/dance piece where they all come on with the prop suitcases. Jo is ecstatic to get a dance piece into the show - she and Haggis do move particularly well! It turns into quite a nice little 4-minute piece - involving Hags, Jo, Jake, Paul and Rooben (in a rather more vague manner) doing some nice moving round suitcases that don't move, and a bit of hat stuff, to the strains of a jolly version of "Sweet Georgia Brown" on cd. It would be nice to fit Trent and Martha into this piece when they arrive on Tuesday, but we wonder whether the stage areas we sometimes get will allow for 7 people moving around - as they both play instruments, maybe we will do this piece with them on stage playing live music for it., but not moving around We'll see!

Paul helps me do enough badge-centre cutting for tomorrow's school, and then it's back to the internet office.

Plans change

Then we get a phone call from Somchai, saying sorry, but we won't be able to work at Thai Meung School tomorrow as it is a teacher-training day - rats! We don't have a great deal longer here, and we really can't afford to lose working days like this. I get back to a nice organisation called Grass Roots who work with Burmese children in the area, who I talked to last week, and we manage to arrange for us to work with a tiny Burmese school tomorrow afternoon.

16 January