weekend updates

My room



RJ and his cakes



So some updates and pictures from this past weekend.  Our CRM group (12 of us) went out on a banka to do seagrass and mangrove assessments on Saturday morning.  Our survey sites were much nicer than last week, not too much trash and pretty decent visibility.  For the seagrass assessments we had a grid with 16 squares on it.  We randomly drop the "quadrat" and then dive down to see what % is covered with seagrass.  Our results average to about 18 % coverage which is pretty poor.  Healthy coverage is over 60%.  But enough of the boring technical stuff that most of the people reading this do not care about..

We arrived back home around 11 A.M. and I had to go straight to a birthday party for R.J.  He is the nephew of my host mother.  If there is one thing I've learned about birthday parties here in the Philippines it is that they are a BIG DEAL.  The two weekends I have been in Banate I have attended a birthday party each weekend.  I will be going to another one this Saturday, so that makes three weekends in a row.  My host family went to Iiloilo on Thursday to buy cake, gifts, and the other necessary materials.  There was massive amounts of food, drinks, and of course videoke.  7 P.C.T's were in attendance and we were looked upon to provide the majority of entertainment (i.e. singing and dancing).  I think I did about 6 videoke songs ranging from the Beach Boys, Micheal Jackson, and Hall and Oates.  It was alot of fun, but I had to leave a little early to go home and take a nap because we were up really early doing assessments.

Food spread at party, NAMIT GID!

Sundays here are pretty standard.  My host mom and brother go to church from 8-9 in the morning.  When they come back we all eat breakfast and then pretty much lounge around all day.  I do most of my language studying on Sundays where I can ask my fellow host sisters for help on the assignments I do not understand.  Everyone I live with speaks some English so communication is not really an issue.  Also, Sundays are spent doing laundry too.  I think it took me about 3-4 hours from the soaking of the clothes to the washing then rinsing and hanging.  It started to rain in the late afternoon so my clothes did not fully dry until Monday afternoon.  This meant wearing jeans on Monday because I had no other clean shorts to wear to class.  I think I have adjusted pretty good to the weather here, but definitely not enough to wear jeans throughout the day.  I have started negotiations with Lynn to help or have her do my laundry because she would be able to do it in 1/2 the time and get my clothes twice as clean.  So, we will see where that progresses as the week goes on.. 

Lynn and I doing my laundry

Host sister (Lynn), me, and our helper (Freezy)

Tapos na...

Rob