2011-09-20 – Day 8

7:30
The new volunteers arrived. We had to get up at 5am to be in the camp to welcome them. It's raining like crazy and the whole camp is muddy, wet and cold. It's neither a nice coming back for us nor a good first impression for the new people.
With the new bus, two people I'm so happy to see have arrived. The first one is Satoshi. I think he did a very good job on the first group and after the problems with the female leader, I appreciate his skills even more. The second person is Nyuent-san. The older gentleman from Myanmar we met when we came the very first time.
35 people is quite a lot but the group makes a very friendly impression on me... Let's see what we can do today.

14:30
We got assigned to work on some rice fields which were cleaned before but the group could not finish the work completely and we tried to sort their pile and to get the last bits from the fields. Some time must have passed between the former group and us because some plants were already growing and large parts were covered by soil. I thought with so many people it would have been easy to do the job but since it was raining, the fields and the pile were so muddy that we had real difficulties working there. Satoshi decided to finish work a lot earlier than normal because it really didn't make any sense to get more wet and dirty than we already were to do the work of 5 people on a sunny day. Luckily the bus has a really strong heating system and the things which got wet are almost dry already. There would have been no way to dry them in the camp.
It looks like the volunteer center will be closed tomorrow. The weather is supposed to get even worse and I guess there is no point in sending people out there until it stops raining. The typhoon is really messing things up :(
Since the volunteer center will be closed, Satoshi is trying to organize a bus back to Tokyo earlier than planned. It was actually Ruben's idea and I really hope we can leave soon. Maybe by tonight, which would be nice... I wouldn't mind skipping a rainy typhoon night in our tent camp.
So, but first supermarket and onsen :)

20:00
The bus can't come before the morning, maybe even lunch. Well, at least the group is really cool. Guess we can get over the time... ^^