Hey all!

The islands are wonderful!

Let me catch y'all up on what's been going on...let's see....

Wesdnesday we had another dive in The Fishbowl, which is aptly named: tons of fish! We also had an AMAZING thing happen...FOOD SHIPMENT DAY! It finally arrived and so did the half of the shipment we missed last food shipment time so now we have a month's worth of food for two weeks. We have been eating well the last few days. Pizza last night even! And cake!!! We also finally got our matresses in wednesday too.

Thursday we learned about our research projects and I'm really excited about two of them. One of them is studying how the coral reefs fared after Hurricane Ike this summer and the other is studying the biodiversity of reef fish. I can't decided which one I want to apply for. We have to write a letter justifying why we should be on whatever project we choose.

We also had our first dive for our Advanced Open Water dive course which was a navigation dive. Basically you have to learn to navigate underwater with and without a compass. It was pretty challenging because there was a really strong current yesterday which made the water a lot cloudier than it usually is. We did really well though, I was impressed! I navigate better underwater than I do out of it!

Today we had a fake town hall meeting where we were all asigned community roles, like fishermen or processing plant owners or tourist developers and we have to debate lowing the conch export quota. It was really interesting and people got really creative with it. One of the girls actually had a PETA speech about how we shouldn't be harvesting conchs at all because conchs need their meat more than we do. It was hilarious. But it was pretty interesting.

Aside from that, not a whole lot else has been going on. It's been a pretty low-key week. We start fish ID sessions on Monday, so that'll get a little crazy, but it won't be awful.

Also, just for those of you back home...it is day 11 without a freshwater shower, and we still have a water shortage so no showers in the near future! It's really not as bad as it sounds...I promise.

Bye for now!