PAD Part 38

Enjoying some hammock time

A Day at the Beach

About a 5 minute walk from my house, there's this place called the Melanesian Brotherhood, or Tum Sisiro. It's a religious community comprised of about 50 guys, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25, who live together, pray together, and study together. For three years they live and study together at the Brotherhood as Novices, before they are promoted to become full-fledged Brothers.

Every Friday afternoon they play soccer by my house, and a few months ago, I started playing with them. Even though my soccer skills have diminished significantly since I last played in 8th grade, it's fun to run around and be part of a team sport again after so long!

With kava shortages in town the last few weeks, I've also been finding myself more and more at the kava bar that they run, as it's a reliable source of good kava and good conversation. I would now call many of the Novices and Brothers my friends, and they call me a "Sister" of the Brotherhood (a nice little affirmation!) Last weekend, they were celebrating the fact that some of the third year Novices who just returned from a 3-months long practical assignment in a faraway province by heading to the beach, and they invited me along!

I know there are a lot of pictures in this slideshow, but when I was scrolling through them on my computer, I just felt like the sum total of them gave a nice impression of the day, especially when viewed at high speed (like below). Highlights: jumping off or rocks, eating roasted chicken and Napoleonfish, watching boat shenanigans and teaching the guys to play three flies up. Enjoy!

PAD Part 37

The bread cabinet at Lemus (lay-moose), full to bursting

A Good Meeting

Recently, I've been feeling a little lost in my job here. More and more I find myself getting frustratred handling the same issues every day, and the lack of direction is getting harder to be okay with.
What better solution to this problem than a new project!
Months ago, I was approached about helping create a tourism website for PENAMA. I agreed to help, but the project didn't really go anywhere. The content wasn't available, the pictures weren't great, and the motivation didn't seem to be there with my counterparts, so I let the idea go as a "that would've been cool had it happened" kind of thing.
Yesterday, however, I sat down with the Provincial Tourism Officer, the Provincial Planner, and Hollingsworth, a community member who's is interested in tourism. We had a great, 2 hour long meeting, where we talked about expectations, hopes, and realistic approaches to how we can go about working on this project.
We should be meeting again next week, with the next step (hopefully) being a trip around the three islands of PENAMA to the main tourist attractions/bungalows to take photos and gather pertinent information for the site.
After what felt like a couple of months of treading water and not really going anywhere, it's nice to have a new project to sink my teeth into! Here's hoping it works out!

PAD Part 36

I helped run a training for these lovely folks at the Rural Training Center near my town about internet safety