Friday, July 16th: Let's Do It

Let's do it
A new sun colours the forest around our bungalow in a golden hue. It's early morning, Blandine's still asleep, and I've made up my mind. I'm going to continue with the diving course: "Open Water" certification is within reach, I feel it in my bones.

I tell Steve and Sarah of my plans to continue over the breakfast scrambled eggs, they're quite happy for me. And Blandine? Blandine will stick with snorkeling for the moment. She'll join us for our dives, but will only entertain the fish at the surface. There's plenty to see there. Steve sets me up with the course material and I spend half of the day studying. With chapter 1 covered yesterday, I breeze through chapters 2 and 3 of the course and take the appropriate skill-review quizzes, while Blandine goes snorkeling.

WWOOF there it is
Over lunch, Sarah explains Steve and her intend to go WWOOF-ing in New Zealand once their dive teaching here on Vanuatu finishes. It's got nothing to do with taking their puppy to dog training. Nope, WWOOF (http://www.wwoof.org/) is an international  network that links volunteers with job opportunities on organic farms. Rather than just volunteering to help out farmers with their harvest in return for food and lodging, farmers also share their organic farming expertise with WWOOFers. Sounds pretty cool to me!

Garth's most excellent job adventures
I don't know how we got on the subject, but during dinner time Garth entertains us all with stories of the different jobs he's done. He's pretty much worked any job you can imagine from a cheese-making plant to construction work, but the one story that stuck to me the most is the one about the meat processing plant. In his own colourful style, Garth gives us his mind blowing, rather unappetizing insight into the world of meat processing. Meat hooks with whole goats on them for starters, a machine that skins the goats, a guy whose job it is to operate a vacuum cleaner-like machine to suck out the eyes from the skinned animal heads, goo at every level, and so on, the whole grim story of a meat processing plant laid out in intricate detail by an Australian man who spares no non-verbal behaviour to mimic all machines with his hands, somehow makes for real entertaining dinner conversation. Just what I need after a hard day of studying while everyone else had fun.