Snorkeling in Savusavu

Picture of participants at WWF workshop, see if you can win the "Where's Aric" game

Fun at Labasa airport (in case there weren't enough bad pictures of me out there)

I am getting ready to make a trip down to Suva this week for the first training session that I will be helping to facilitate for the new group. I go tomorrow to meet with some people from WWF and Wildlife Conservation Society to talk about some future work and get a few things set that can’t be done long distance. Another volunteer is also holding a poetry competition there in the big city that I am hoping to attend, and which I expect to pretty fantastic (not nearly enough events like there are held in Fiji). This weekend is a holiday weekend here (the Queen’s birthday, observed), so we have Monday off work. As such, after preparing for my training session on Saturday, I hopefully plan on getting some diving in. On Tuesday I have a doctor’s appointment for a nagging ear problem I have been having, then my training session is on Wednesday. I fly back up next Thursday, then am off to a meeting in a village outside of labasa for a day or so. It stands to be a bit of an exciting week.

Not a whole lot going on up here the last week or so. I am working on getting a meeting together of local Labasa leaders and other stake holders to discuss the environmental issues we are dealing with in the city and strategies we can look at to solve them (or at the least mitigate them). The impetus for the meeting is figuring out the best way to use some funding that is available for projects working on these things, and the hope would be to bring other organizations that are trying to do the same kind of work into the fold so that we can pool our resources and do something a bit bigger than we would be able to accomplish on our own individually. So, going into all this we have some good ideals, let’s hope we can keep that legitimacy and come out of it with something good.

If I don’t get back up here next week it is because I’m going to be kinda all over the place. I will do my best to post something soon after.