We have some time to relax and catch up
with reading news and sending mails after a very busy 10 days. We
have had our first volunteers for MCP the last two weeks, 36 at once!
Ranum Efterskole, a Danish boarding school visited us with 33
students aged 15-16 years old and 3 teachers. They stayed at Bongo
Bongo Divers in Dauin and we did the diving from there.
Half of the students did their open
water and (part of their) advanced open water, while the other
students followed a biology diving program, organised by us. The
biology program consisted of learning to identify a few fish species
and some invertebrates and try to identify them during a timed swim
or along a transect line.
We were incredibly lucky watching whale
sharks in Oslob. Most of the students have seen over 10 whale sharks
and some of them almost run in to a whale shark while filming another
one. The visibility was not that good, but because we were diving it
was easy to swim from one whale shark to the next and looking back at
some of the pictures people made, the view was still good enough to
have a proper look at these magnificent beasts.
We don't know which dive students
thought was most exciting, watching the whale sharks or their first
night dive. It is a whole different world on the reef during the
night, with (hermite) crabs, mantis shrimps, cuttle fish who
sometimes look like moving rocks, and the waving arms of the corals.
Our last diving day with everybody was
a trip to Apo island. Counting the number of burned backs of people I
would say we got more than enough sun. The coral was beautiful and we
saw turtles, sea snakes and of course a lot of (big) fish. There was
also some time to explore Apo Island itself.
The program did not only consist of
diving. We visited an elementary and a high school in Zamboanguita.
That caused some interesting scenes, since the transport went by open
truck. It is not very common to see 40 white people in a truck and
this caused a lot of pointing, laughing and waving by Filipino's.
Some of the smaller kids had actually never seen somebody with blue
eyes and blond hair and started crying, but after it was time to go
again they were hugging goodbye and told the students not to leave so
their fear was easy to overcome. One of the students even got
permission from the headmaster of the Dauin high school to join the
Filipino students for a whole afternoon of classes. Apparently the
Danish schools are much more relaxed than the Filipino schools, which
invoked students to mention that from now on they would always do
their homework. No uniforms, no Sir and Mam and rules are less
strict.
The visit to the local waterfalls of
Red Rock were well liked as well; it is always nice to try to swim as
close to the waterfall as possible especially after a steep walk up
the hill.
Dumaguete has been thoroughly checked
out by everyone, some students went there 4 times. Since there is
only so much you can do in this relatively small city, we guess the
local Mc Donalds probably had a good week! A lot of the students
bought a ukelele as a souvenir and unfortunately only a few knew how
to play it well but heir repertoire was a bit limited ....
It was a tiring but very nice 10 days.
The students behaved very well (only broke a peddle of a kayak), were
enthusiastic and most of them had a good level of English which made
it easy to communicate (although if there are 38 Danish people and
only two Dutch it is easy to switch to Danish again).
We are still at Bongo Bongo at the
moment, because the building of our huts is still behind schedule,
meaning we don't have a house yet, as our earlier rental house is now
vacated by a botanist of the arboretum. The new temporary sleeping
room will the freshly painted storage room in our new kitchen.
In two weeks the first two volunteers
will be arriving, so it is time again to hire some extra workers
(again) so one of the volunteer huts will be finished as well. Now we
have time to supervise them again, which usually means they work a
bit faster.
So far, we have a finished kitchen, 1
almost finished hut (our house), 4 huts with finished concrete
foundations but without roof and walls, a half finished equipment
room for dive gear and an unpaved access road which is now in much
better condition because endless loads of sand, gravel and stones
have been added. At the busiest days, we had 25 construction workers
walking around in the arboretum, but the last two weeks we had to
scale down to about 12. Have a look at the MCP facebook page for
pictures of the building.
It is definitely nice that we can start
working with volunteers and finally go from the planning phase to the
exploratory part of the research, starting with a follow up of the
reef check course in a few days and hopefully some dives in
Zamboanguita.
