After a quick breakfast, Somphone arrives in his tuk tuk to take us to his school as promised. It's a short drive out of town. Entering the school we are slightly surprised to find many hundreds of children along with their mopeds and bicycles - Somphone had told us that since today is Chinese New Year the school would be on holiday. It transpires that despite this fact, they are still required to come in and help clean the school grounds!

The buildings are a mixture of new and run down concrete structures, all lacking any of the warmth we have observed in the primary schools found next to the Buddhist temples. The buildings surround a huge expanse of uneven land, home to a goal post or two but not much more.

Somphone takes us inside to the staffroom where we meet a number of teachers including a school director, Mme Pheng Keo Pamya. We're given glasses of green tea before being taken to the all important computer room.

They have 6 machines, all donated by an American tourist; not many for a school population of 3000, soon to grow to 5000! The biggest schools in the UK are around 2000.

Two computers don't work and neither does their printer so Karim's first job is to sort these out! Having done this and much to Somphone's pleasure we then spend a while teaching him and a number of other teachers some basic spreadsheet skills using Excel. Everyone is extremely grateful, especially for the maths teaching resources we give them from our Ray of Hope consignment we are still carrying. At midday the school director is back thanking us as well.

Somphone then takes us on a tour of the school - it's soon clear that aside from the government published text books and exercise books, the school barely has any teaching resources at all - even the tiny library has been donated by a visiting Canadian tourist and features no more than a handful of titles - and this is the wealthiest part of the country by some margin.

We leave the school overwhelmed by the warmth and enthusiasm of the staff and their welcome. We promise to send our new friends more teaching materials on our return and to investigate other ways and means of providing expertise to schools such as these. It strikes us that there must be many other teachers and IT specialists travelling throughout the developing world who would love to make contact with a school if only for an afternoon - there must be a more effective mechanism than chance meetings...

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