I fly in from China with my cargo of porcelain bowls safely stowed in my hand luggage. A dozen good reasons to feel happy.

I have one day to do 3 loads of washing and pack up the car with camping gear. We have season tickets to the National Folk Festival in Canberra. It is held over the 5 days of Easter each year. They bill it as 5 days in a perfect world. And this is true, but not for the reasons that they think! I’ll return to this later.

We enjoy the music, the food, the people, catching up with friends. It’s all good. We get to catch 3 different concerts with Heath Cullen, always good, but this year, 3 times better.

I also catch up with Mal Webb a really ‘out there’ performer working at the edge of what is possible with mouth percussion, 12 instruments and a loop machine!

A really great week.

We return home and work the washing machine to the max. I have a kiln to collect from the galvanisers. I welded it before leaving for China. It’s been ‘hot dipped’ now, and ready to collect. I have a week to fettle, clean, etch, prime, and top coat it before Janine and I fly out to Cambodia, at the end of the week, where we are volunteering for a couple of weeks.

To say that there is a lot a poverty here is such an understatement. Almost everyone is dirt poor. There is so much ingenuity here to ‘make do’. I’m so impressed with these people’s resilience in the face of grinding poverty.

If I ever hear another Australian winge  about how hard their life is……

We live in a perfect world. We are so lucky. We just don’t know how lucky we are.

A little time away working in a third world country really grounds you.