Back to work

Buavou village

Mikelle being a good volunteer and catching rain water during our "cyclone" scare

We may have been going a little stirr crazy after being in the same house with 11 volunteers for 24 hours

I have great stories and such from my christmas vacation, but I want to wait to share those until I have the pictures from the trip to post (which should be by the end of next week), so check back in a few days for that.

I got back about a week ago, and hopefully I can hit the ground running here on some work in the new year. This past week I made a couple of field visits to aquaculture farms in the area. One of the things I hear the most from villages in the MPA areas is that they have not found a way to supplement the income and food generation that they have lost due to setting aside some of their fishing areas to be protected. As such, I am working on traveling around to the villages in the Provence that have sustainable income generating projects, looking over their operations, identifying individuals in the community who can transfer these skills to other communities, and then trying to connect the dots. Theoretically it is a good plan, as there is some governmental money set aside to help some of these projects to get off the ground, but we'll see how it goes logistically. The visits this week have been good, and there is certainly a large market available for aquaculture product and for the communities that have a low supply, it is good protein source. I am also looking at communities that do bee keeping, pearl farming, and seaweed farming to visit in the next month or so. Hopefully after that I will have a small array of possible projects that interested villages can chose from based on their needs and community assets.

Otherwise things are kinda slow here in Labasa. I've been the only volunteer in town (as the others are still finishing out their holiday vacations), so it's been pretty quiet. Next week i will be in Suva for a couple of work days and then a three day training at the end of the week (I was chosen to work in out peer support network here, and they are bringing the eight of us in to teach us how to support our peers). My plan is to get back up here next weekend when I return and write again.

I hope every one's holidays here great, mine certainly were. I look forward to hearing updates from all you guys.