Coming to the end of "Christmas holidays" as i call them. I've been blogging with photos on our main blog about this time. The new school year starts next week, actually the first years have already started. Soeun is teaching a preaching subject like before, but thats the only one of his usual subjects. This year he will also teach Romans and help teach Evangelism. So he's been doing lots of prep for those.

Most of the stuff I was doing last semester was with students, so this last month and a half (since we got back from Oz) I've had a different routine to normal. One normal thing is that I have still been going to the primary school once a week to help the English teachers, and also Bible study (with expats) is still on. 

But the groups of students I was helping with English doesn't happen when the students are away. I haven't seen most of the Bible school students for months, but there are a few girls from church who are still around. Rather than have English group though, we did some cooking. It was their idea, after we made pancakes at the end of last year (June) they asked if we could make other things.

We ended up meeting about once a week at my house to cook. Before hand I prepared (tried to anyway) the recipe in Khmer. While we were cooking we spoke both languages. It was a really good way to do language exchange. I was trying to give instructions in Khmer, if they didn't do what I wanted them to do I realised  they probably didn't understand what I was saying.

Apart from church and shopping, I've had 3 main Khmer language activities going over the last 1.5 months. The recipe and cooking that I just mentioned, plus I have started watching a show on TV each night (a dubbed Korean soap that one of my Khmer friends watch) and the other main thing is reading with the teachers at school. Each morning they read out load a chapter from the Bible. I've been trying to prep each week so I can read too. We've just started Romans.

I've also had some "homeside" jobs to do to prep for next year- forms to fill out etc. I've got some other bits and pieces to do over the next few months too. Need to make sure I keep working on stuff but not too much that I forget that I'm still here in Cambodia.

Other than that I've been going to the market and cooking more than usual. During semester we eat dinner and breakfast with the students, and KS also eats lunch there. These days there is no dinner or breaky there, so more shopping and cooking at home.

I thought by default when the student come back I'd start up the things I was doing before (helping them with English and paying one of them to be my language helper a few hours a week) but I don't think thats going to happen. 

I've started to get involved in something else, a friend moved out of PP and asked me if I wanted to take her place in a group. I've been to a few meetings already, so I think I'll keep doing that.

Last semester I felt like I was spending  a lot of time preparing and doing English stuff, but I didn't prep for my language sessions that well. Hopefully this new semester timetable will be better for my Khmer and other things in the future.