Leominster School, U.S.A. (July 2004)

Mornings were spent teaching English in the school and in the afternoon, the local students came to the centre to help on some farm projects and to play sports. The main work involved extending the duck pen to create a fence around the rice padi. The ducks eat the eggs of snails which otherwise would end up as rice-eating snails.

"The project was wonderful. Everyone really enjoyed the Maekok River Village Resort Initiative and Rosie and Bryan Massingham. They are excellent teachers, who gave a lot of their time to really teaching the challengers how to teach English. The resort itself was quite posh, although we had simple dormitory-style accomodations. There is a ropes course, which I taught the challengers how to use so they could take the Thai teenagers on it.

The whole week was well organized, though-out and supervised and I think all of the challengers gained a lot from it. I felt the cost was quite appropriate for what we received - fabulous food, full use of the resort, including the pool, weight room, TV lounge, table-tennis room, bicycles, low ropes course. And on top of all of this, I really felt that we were looked after personally by Rosie and Bryan, not only did they facilitate the interactions with the school-children, but Rosie ran a class in the morning to help the students prepare their lessons for the day, and she ran a review at the end of the day to discuss how the day went. I would definitely recommend this project site to future groups. Two students mentioned that this phase was their favorite part of the trip."