Daily life at MCP

I have time to write this first part of the weblog, because the electrician had just cut the power which means I finally have time to write. It has been a busy time the last month with working days from 7h30 till 18h30, but we are functioning more and more as we have envisioned Marine Conservation Philippines to be and that is nice.

Of course there are ups and downs. Car problems arise on a regular basis and then there are the small funny problems. It turns out that in our house the lights are a bit weird. The porch light is permanently on, unless we cut all the power in our house and the switch for the porch light is an actual master switch with with you can turn on and off all the lights in our house. By the time it is fixed it is two weeks later, but look on the bright side, at least we always have light.

We are getting more and more in an organized daily rhythm, because the cars do not break down that often any more and we are getting more volunteers which means we have to start to work in a structured way. Our daily program is two dives in the morning, which takes actually the whole morning and part of the afternoon depending on where we dive and have lunch between 13h00 and 14h30.

The afternoon is used for presentations (learning different fish species, what MCP is about), data entry, watching a nature documentary or practical work on the base which ranges from making hammocks to design a fireplace, make a recycling system for waste or making concrete weights for the gym (unbelievable, I cannot even lift them 1 cm from the ground but that's just me).

The cook prepares really nice food, Filipino but also international. We even had sushi last week! We work from Monday to Friday, on Saturday we have a fun dive and Saturday afternoon and the complete Sunday we have weekend. Each Saturday evening we have a BBQ. So far we have not been doing overmuch during our Sundays. It is very nice to lie in Dolf's homemade hammock of fishing net and just read a book. Sometimes we go to Dumaguete, or just visit a restaurant and have a nice western meal for lunch.

There are a lot of small things that still need to happen, but for the coming months we have two workers permanently on the base who are making bamboo furniture, make small adjustments to the cabins and do a lot of other stuff. Each week we see the improvements. Not as fast anymore as in the beginning of course, because the other 25 workers are back to fishing again.

Researchwise we are now focusing on fish on species level on each dive site. Since there are 2000 different fish species in the Philippines, we only pay attention on the butterflyfish and angelfish for now. That is already a challenge, because it turns out we have 31 species of butterflyfish. By now, Dolf and me can recognize them all, but it is a challenge for new volunteers because some of them do not even know what a butterflyfish is to begin with.

But we designed a teaching system in which they learn a few new species each day on land through a powerpoint presentation, and we point them out underwater. After a few days they are able to do a test both above water and underwater and if they pass they can join in on the research.

We are now trying to analyze the first data, but that takes a while because our statistical skills are a bit rusty and of course we have to use an open source statistical program which works way different compares to the program we used in university. But with a good free online manual it's just a question of time before we can say something useful about our first results.

Since the weblogs are not that regular anymore, I advise people who want to have more info on a regular basis to have a look at the Marine Conservation Philippines facebookpage or like it. We upload pictures every once in a while as well as marine information (both semi-scientific or just newspaper articles as well as nice pictures about diving).