Two weeks in

As anyone could imagine, quite a lot has happened over the past two weeks. Living in Bonthe is as much like village life as I've ever experienced. Every afternoon I fetch water from a well outside for my daily showers and toilet use, there is no electricity grid and all power comes from our personal generator which I use for about 1-2 hours of electricity a day - 3 if I feel indulgent and am willing to use my boat fuel, internet hasn’t worked since Thursday (I'm even writing this post offline as it's still not working on Sunday night).

But despite these lamentations, I am really beginning to get into the rhythm of life here. Every day my two translators (Richard and Amara) go with me to villages to interview, examine processing, visit harvesting sites, and analyse samples when we get back to the office. We've analysed a total of 178 oysters since I got here. This is to look at the variation in size and meat yield between each village's harvesting ground. We've found some variation in whole oyster sizes between harvesting grounds, but will need more samples to get clearer results.

This week I feel like I'm starting to adjust to the rhythm of life here. There are almost always kids running into the house or garden when I'm around. It's difficult to work when they're always passing through waiting for the next interesting thing I will do. One is sleeping on the floor by my feet right now.  The teenagers often help with samples for hours at a time. Then if I want to I can always have a Mendei (local language) lesson from the kids. Something I often do when I feel like procrastinating from work in the evening. I even ended up playing barefoot football yesterday while intending to go for a jog.

Perhaps the most fun I had this week was to help cut wood with a friend I've made here. All food in Bonthe is cooked in open fires, so there is a limitless demand for firewood taken from the local mangroves. I arranged to go with my friend Suleiman (a mangrove logger/high school student) - 18 years old. He and I both paddled for about an hour through pristine mangrove forest before he decided to fell a few of the trees. We spent about 40 minutes felling trees and loading the wood onto the canoe before paddling back. I was a bit alarmed about cutting down 4 mangrove trees from what seemed an untouched forest in exchange for 9 logs of wood, but I suppose it’s a way of life here (a way of life that might soon be compromised). Yet still, it was my first excursion in the mangrove and I got a lot of exercise.

Next week is going to be very busy since the tides are perfect for oyster harvesting. Amara, Richard, and I plan to visit 3 communities and examine their harvesting methods. Many more oyster samples to come!