Back to training

The past few weeks have been pretty uneventful. After going to visit my home in Tanna I came back to 3 more weeks of class everyday. I spent all of last week learning Reef Check, a world wide coral reef monitoring program. Even though I'm not going to be living on the coast I might be helping other people out with Reef Check. We spent everyday out on the reef. I can't complain, it makes a pretty nice classroom. We learned all about reef health, fish and other animals of the reef. I was able to see schools of eagle rays, sea turtles, and I'm finally getting to see some sharks (don't worry mom the nice kind). The other night we went out on the reef at night to catch sea turtles as part of a sea turtle monitoring program. We got two green sea turtles and two hawksbill turtles, which we tagged and released. I also got to see my first shark at night, which was really cool, and I also saw a lot of flourescent jelly fish and other little glowing animals. I'm not going to lie though, it was a little eerie swimming over open ocean when all you could see is the narrow band of light ahead of you from the underwater light. So yeah, that's all I've been doing for the last week in class. Now I'm starting to work on things like setting up a bank account, and figuring out how to get my stuff sent out to the Tanna bush. Not an easy task. Besides that I do have an interesting story to share that proves how strange Vanuatu is. Last week, 49 prisoners escaped from the Vila prison. First of all, 49 prisoners escaping at once is somewhat odd. Then they all went out, drank kava, and promptly returned to the prison afterwards to turn themselves back in. Men here really like their kava. In Tanna the "prison" has a program where the good prisoners take the bad ones out for kava each night as long as they promise to come back. You can't make this kind of stuff up.