I've been teaching at a small, boutique English teaching facility in Colombo for 9 weeks, directly off the back of the Ajarn website. My employer is a good guy, really decent and has looked after me well so far. All our communication is sensible and what's more he sourced me from the Ajarn site as I mentioned.

My "brief" is conversational English. I teach 12-14 year olds or 14-16 year olds or adults for 3 hours a day on most days, sometimes I have a morning class as well. It's seriously not "high pressure".

The salary is small but the package includes (very good) accommodation and meals, and because the cost of living in Sri Lanka is so low, it's livable. The cost of food for example is simply laughable, and I mean that in a very good way. Also transport in my case is provided most days.

Where I am is a long way out of the centre of Colombo, from anywhere remotely "downtown" and that is an impediment. I'm virtually in a "village", five kilometers from an outer suburb. And so life is quiet - very quiet indeed.

I imagine it's similar for many English teachers who land in a Thai province, an up-country town or village. The charm wears off pretty fast, replaced by inertia and boredom. This is a very big problem for creative people who've grown up in large urban atmospheres like me. However there is a benefit to everything and you just have to figure out how you can make something of the life here while hanging on to the things in life that you may want to do later on.

The students here are very sweet, very co-operative but if anything, a little too 'inward'. It takes a bit of work to get them 'moving' sometimes, but that's far preferable to aggressive, highly extrovert types, so you can’t have everything!

I would recommend Sri Lanka as a possible destination for English teachers. Oh, the other thing was the working visa was taken care of with no problems, unlike that ongoing Thai lunacy of how difficult it is for many teachers to secure a visa, the visa run silliness and all that jazz.

Sam McNally