INDO DIARIES 2010 - Sunday 11th July

I think we woke at 0727. Considering we went to bed at 8pm, that was some snooze!

Ian catching up on his sleep, I can understand, but I am just plain lazy!

Pro Fauna IS the animal protection group, but we are staying at P wec.
The two are run by the same guy, but P wec is the money making 'eco-tourist'
holiday /volunteer destination. We did not 'save' any animals while we were there.

At breakfast, we learnt of another change to our plan. We were told that we would go to the part of the forest inhabited by many species of bird, but no, not any more. We were to 'assist' P wec, again, only this time it was a group of teachers from Surabaya. They were just going to do the flying fox today.

We sat at the bamboo chairs, getting ready to 'assist' (i.e. doing nothing), then Asti, our lovely counterpart said we needed to prep some educational games for when we visited the schools to teach the children. (Part of the volunteer outline is to meet children and help them understand about their environment. It is basically an extension of my own job, but I was so happy to do it.)

We thought of a few games like memory, Chinese whispers, guess the animal and it was suddenly snack time.

lopes 

Today, it was rice mixed with a little coconut sugar and then some grated coconut on top. It was much less sugary than yesterday, you could tell form the crowd too. They were so subdued. You barely knew they were there. Apart from a few photos, they didn't really want to interact.

Lunch was yummy!

Lunch over, we had a new task. We were to make 'educational signs' for the P wec compound. Some of the plants and trees you could see had little hand made signs standing in the ground next to them. The names of the plants were in Indonesian and in Latin. We were going to make more.

Let me take this moment to say that this is my second trip too Indonesia volunteering. I am always happy to help but making signs???!!! It felt so, pathetic. With Kalaweit, ((Kalaweit Blog entries here))I came to save the gibbons, and I really felt like I did some good work, yet here, there are no animals like was falsely lead to believe, nor is there any 'real' work for us to do.

Asti emerged from the kitchen with 9 plastic containers of coconut oil, mostly empty, some with greasy dregs inside. Nice. We were to make four signs from each container.

Ian hard 'at work'.

Using blunt tools, we proceeded over the course of the afternoon.

We managed to cut out the rectangle shapes and
even round them with scissors and file them with sandpaper. 

We painted them bamboo green too and left them to dry.

Asti reminded us that we should think about what to do with our days off. Apparently, north of Malang were some lovely beaches, or of course, there was the great Mount Bromo to climb. Sunrises there were deemed to be the best in Asia (beating Fuji san?!) now, that has to be seen!

It is 8pm and the insane soundtrack of the local villagers keeps me awake. The speakers have been on full force now each night. I am told that they are 'celebrating' a circumcision - poor kid. They do it at 10 years old here, I dread to think how.