Secret Garden Environmental Activity Centre

I am doing well with my volunteer project. I have been busy with daily beach clean-ups, teaching the kids swimming on the weekends, hiking and surveying a grass planting area after a massive rockslide on the island, etc...

There are about 15 volunteers, most of them in their early 20s. They are from the i 2 i program and most are English. Very nice group! Half are teaching English at the school and half of us are doing conservation work. I am thinking that I will split my time between both projects.

Basically we clean the beach every morning at 8:00 am which consists of lots of cigarette butts, beer bottles, broken flip flops and the like left over from the night before's parties. Not much fun, but a good thing nonetheless...

We also hike up once a week to survey a massive grass and tree replanting done by the Secret Garden because of a major rockslide that seriously damaged the reef at Tanote Bay. We are basically taking pictures, collecting data, etc... It is pretty steep and very hot, so it is good excercise for me. We are also working on awareness projects to educate the locals (ex-pats and Thais alike) and tourists about different environmental concerns on the island. We are in charge of kids' swimming lessons at different resort pools around the island and fundraising projects. After swimming one day another volunteer and I were walking back and had two of our little kiddos decide that we needed to carry them back to Mae Had. They are hard to say "no" to so we carried these little Thai girls for a few miles getting some very strange looks. The kids didn't speak English and Thai people and foreigners were just staring like we were tourists stealing these children!

We are taking part in a big beach and reef cleaning event on the 31st. I will get to dive and pick up stuff from the Mae Had (town we live in) reef. Non-divers will collect the rubbish from boats as the divers surface. Should be a good chance to get wet! I am also working on trying to write a few grant proposals for the project. Bee, the Italian guy that started all of this, has plenty of volunteers but not much in the way of funds. If anyone has any ideas, let me know... I could use all the help I can get!

We are planning a big fundraising party next month and are hoping to raise about 10,000 baht (or roughly $300 USD). Doesn't sound like much, but it goes far in Thailand.

Anyway, we are doing well. We are quite well-known on this small island which is nice. We get waved at everywhere we go. We have a dog that follows us around when he sees us until we feed him. He hangs around the restaurant that we frequent for breakfast.

We were hanging an informational sign at the police station and we were standing there trying to figure how to do it when the policeman came out in nothing but a towel! He told us that he would hang it up for us, but we were all just staring hoping that it wouldn't fall down. That would not have happened at home!

We got to check out Muay Thai boxing last night! An Italian living in our guest house fought last night so we went to check it out. There was one knockout in a total of 7 fights. It was a bit more controlled than I expected.

Jarod is doing great with his diving and will have a separate entry about all that coming soon!

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