Power down...

Expedition 36 is now well underway. It's the most international of groups so far with volunteers from : UK, Ireland, Slovakia, Germany, Holland, France, Spain, Canada, Portugal/Mozambique, South Africa, Switzerland, Madagascar - and there are still two American volunteers to come.
It's nice having such a variety of nationalities, though I've noticed that those from the British Isles (and Ireland) tend to stick together, with everybody else mingling much more. In this group, most of the British vols are also of similar ages, so it could also be down to that too.
So far all the vols seem keen and interested in everything and everybody danced at the epi-bar with the nahudas when we met them - which is always a good sign, because we usually do it on a 'diving night' which means people can't drink more than a beer.
However, they were also dancing there on Friday and then again on Sunday and unfortunately, got rather a bit too drunk there last night and stayed out beyond our curfew of midnight. It's actually the first time that Justin and I stayed until the curfew time, so the curfew could have been abused many more times in the past, but it's the first time I've known about it for sure. So today we had to go round telling everyone 'off' for breaking the camp rules and also talking to them about drinking too heavily in the village and putting our reputation at risk.
We also - for women mainly - had to talk about them putting their safety at risk too by drinking that much. I hope that giving them a telling off will be enough, but I guess we'll see next party night. There were also a few staff who broke the rules so I had to talk to them too. Policeman is not a role I really relish, nor do I enjoy telling people off. It's interesting how different people react though. One staff member accepted full responsibility - yes, he was too drunk and yes he should not have drunk that much or encouraged volunteers to break the curfew. But other staff members, and at least a few of the volunteers played it a little bit innocent - claiming they didn't have watches, or didn’t notice us all leaving and trying to get them to leave etc. etc. But I'd seen them hiding from me, and a couple had out and out refused when Louis (field scientist) had tried to persuade them to leave, so I know that they were just lying to get out of being told off. It really made me feel like a teacher telling off some school children when they couldn't accept responsibility and were trying to somehow get out of it.
Anyway, that was pretty stressful and not my favourite part of the job. BUT the best thing so far since I arrived happened this week because I finally got to sing with the women's association. :) we met on Saturday for a rehearsal. Lalao gave me the words to one of the songs - really difficult words too! And we rehearsed that one, and then another four! I had to join in the dancing too. The rehearsal was just such fun. I felt very welcomed by them, and they thought my dancign was hilarious (which it probably was!) and it was such a pleasure singing harmonies with a group. It sounded great cos we were in quite a small room too. :) the next day, we performed to the volunteers when the womens' assocation cooked lunch for everyone.
The Blue Ventures malagasy staff thought it was absolutely hilarious that I was singing and dancing with the women!! I felt a little embarassed. Mostly because I did not kinow most of the words of the songs and just sung some las or some random vowels! The tunes were relatively straightforward though so I still got to sing and sang some tunes and some harmonies. :) So that was my main highlight of the past week.
Other than that, we have hardly dived because of having had the tail end of a cyclone hit us last week and we had much wind and rain and the accompanying poor visibility as a result. With the rain we've also had rainbows, greater humidity, poor visibility, more insects and a couple of snakes.
The water quality from our showers and taps has also started to clear up. When the shower bucket is full of water, you can now almost see the bottom! It's very exciting! Perhaps I won't have to resort to showering in bottled water after all. And we got apples for
dessert twice last week too. So life continues to be ever changing here.
Right now we have no electricity because the generator died in the storm. So
some work is difficult.