SNORKELING TO PLAYING IN THE MUD

Sunday morning I got up early to go fishing. Richard, who is also working on the same project that I am, though with USAID and not the NGO I am working for, has a 15 foot outboard. We loaded in and sped off to try a few fishing spots. A few minutes after setting sail, we encountered our first pod of dolphins. They were going the opposite direction as we were, but they swam with us for a short distance. That was the first time I had ever seen several dolphins swimming a few feet from me at the front of the boat. Amazing! After we went a ways from Oecusse we drop some lines in the water. I had a hit. It was a 10 plus pound fish. Richard stopped to do some spear fishing and the others and I decided to snorkel. The place we stopped was the most beautiful reef I had ever seen, better than anything I had seen in Thailand. I’m not really sure how long I snorkelled, the beauty of the place made time unimportant. On the way home we encounter two more pods of dolphins; one pod had more than 30 individuals. We arrived home weary and sunburned. I thought I was fine, but I was really wrong. Now my back hurts a ton. Oh well, it will be gone in a day or two.

A far cry from yesterday today was rainy and miserable. I headed out to Passabe with the car fully loaded and hit rain almost immediately. It rained most of the two hours of the trip. On the way into Passabe, we pass a couple of the projects I’m working on. I asked if we could take a side road to see a separating tank that we poured Saturday, but I hadn’t seen yet. We made the left and started down the steep downhill. We went maybe a hundred meters. The car slipped and slid like we were on ice. We quickly realized we shouldn’t have gone that way. The road was a wet slimly clay that was as slick as ice. I knew the moment we started down that we wouldn’t be able to go back up to the road we left, but the driver got nervous and insisted we turn around. We turned around but couldn’t make a meter of progress forward in the slick clay. We pushed and pushed and couldn’t move the truck forward without it sliding back down. Finally we got some communities members with a rope and pulled the car back up to the other road. It took 20 of us to pull the vehicle the 100 meters uphill. The locals got a kick out of the Malae (white person) barefoot in the mud pulling away. By the time I arrived in Passabe, I was wet and muddy. Not a good way to start the week.