First, apologies for a long delay in updating but we are still waiting for onsite internet connection.

This week has seen us busy with our welcome visitors from Australia, Heather, Luca and Chloe from the Faa Gamma Fund raising Team.

Heather arrived last Thursday, along with a couple of bags of clothes collected in Australia, and was very keen to get on with anything to help us progress with prepping the home. Amongst other things she helped with giving the walls a good scrub in the kitchen/eating area.

She also got her design head on and went to work producing a model of how our playground may end up. This was very useful and inspirational and we decided to immediately go ahead with the ‘pencil’ fence.

After a ride around looking for appropriate looking fence post material, we settled on bamboo, which, at 20 baht for an approximately 6metre length, seemed the most cost effective.

To be sure, we first purchased just one length, cut into the sizes we wanted and with points chopped for driving into the ground. Back at Stratton House we drove the four lengths in to check that it was what we wanted. Agreeing tha this should work fine we went ahead and ordered 70 lengths, (paid for by Heather)which should be enough to complete the job.

It turns out that the supplier we ordered from is just one old guy on his own most of the time and not only could he not cut that many to size for us but he could only supply us with 40 lengths for now as the rest is still in the forest waiting to be cut. Still, this was more than enough to go on with.

Heathers partner Luca, and his daughter Chloe arrived on Monday, the same day as the Bamboo and we soon had a good bit of team work going.

For the next few days, Heather and co would go off doing ‘holiday stuff’ in the day, when it was too hot to work, and then return to pitch in with Boon and myself, preparing the fence posts.

The first session involved cutting to size, sanding, and chopping the driving points. Boon and Luca took turns with the cutting and chopping whilst the girls sanded like crazy.

All these posts then needed priming and then glossing in a variety of colours and everyone pitched in with this.

The visit was over before we knew it and its a shame we hadn’t got as far as putting any of the fence up before Faa and her team left. But it was an extremely useful few days help and encouragement and we hope to be driving the first of the fence posts in tonight when the sun eases off.

Once again we would like to thanks Heather, Luca and Chloe for their help and further donations of clothes, bedsheets and games for the kids.

For all the photos from the visit please visit our photobucket album here.