Today
was the fifth day in a row that the White Shark Projects boat has been out on
the water. I think this is the first time in my history with this project that
I can say that. Thankfully, the dreary weather that kept us inland last week
has completely passed us now, and the last few days have been absolutely
beautiful. Yesterday morning was particularly cold out on the boat; it was in
the 40’s, and the wind made it feel even colder. Since there are now only four volunteers,
we’ve all been able to go out on the water every day, which has been really
nice. The volunteer house feels really quiet now with just me, Alina and Amber
here. Thankfully our lovely “Old Bean” (Maarten- and that’s what I’m going to
call him from now on) is hanging out here all the time, and brings along that
extra energy. We just heard from Karla that tomorrow we’ll be going out again,
but the start will be at eight instead of 7:30, so we’ll have another precious
half hour of sleep in the morning. Hearing my alarm go off every morning at
5:30 has been the least enjoyable part of the past week, but I’ve gotten used
to it since being with this project.
Every
morning out on the boat has had some great shark sightings, and every day is a
little bit different. While I was up on the fly deck taking pictures yesterday,
a guest asked me if that trip was about average in terms of sharks. I said that
it’s hard to say exactly what “average” is for these trips. The sharks are
completely wild, we don’t feed them, we never know for sure what’s going to
happen, and we can’t promise anything. Every trip is a bit different. The past
two mornings I’ve actually seen the smallest white shark that I’ve seen in my
time here. I can’t be sure that I was seeing the same shark both days, but I
think I was. At about one and a half meters, it’s clearly a very young shark,
since that’s about the size they are when they’re born. So I’ve seen sharks in
these waters that are anywhere from one and a half meters up to four and a
half- pretty big difference.
This afternoon,
Amber and I helped out at the White Shark Projects Swop Shop for the first
time. Swop Shop is a program where kids that live in the area bring plastic,
glass, and other recyclables to the shop, and in return they earn a certain
number of points that they can then “spend” in the little shop. The shop has
little toys, school supplies, clothes, and other things, and this afternoon we
had close to 200 local kids come through it. When we were finished we learned
that they’d brought in over one thousand pounds worth of recyclables that
they’d picked up from around their neighborhood. Seeing and helping the kids
around the little shop was really interesting- there’s definitely some big
differences between here and the US! Some of the kids were very small- as young
as maybe four or five years old- and they’d all walked over to the shop by
themselves. The lucky ones had shoes on, but most of them were barefoot. Almost
all of the kids had very short hair, and the way they dressed sometimes made it
hard to distinguish the boys from the girls. Probably the biggest difference I
noticed about the behavior of the kids was that none of them ever cried. As I
said, they each had a certain number of points that they could use at the shop,
and some of them didn’t have enough to buy their favorite thing. Back home, if
a kid in a toy store wanted something but was told they couldn’t have it,
they’d burst into tears. But in the Swop Shop if I was helping a kid that
wanted a toy they didn’t have the points for, I’d shake my head and they’d just
put it back on the shelf and keep looking. Not even the really little ones ever
made a fuss! Most of them were very quiet as they looked around, and it was
pretty strange to see. A lot of the kids clearly weren’t used to seeing long blonde
hair like mine, and they touched and stared at it in a pretty puzzled way,
which I thought was pretty funny.
As I said,
tomorrow we go back out to sea at eight, and there’s room for all the
volunteers again. Karla also mentioned that she’s going to try to plan another
volunteer exclusive trip soon- hopefully Thursday or Friday-which should be
great! Having the boat reserved for just the volunteers and crew members is a
lot of fun since we don’t have to be very “professional”, but instead can just
laugh and have fun. This post’s food for thought is something I thought about
while watching the kids in the Swop Shop today: “There are no foreign lands. It
is the traveler only who is foreign.”- Robert Louis Stevenson
No comments:
Post a Comment