I can surf!

Hi! How's it going? Is everyone excited about a long weekend? I didn't learn it until today, but apparently it's a long weekend here in Guyana too. We already had plans to go away Friday afternoon until Monday morning, but I guess it will be nice to have a day around here where I'm not even supposed to work.

This week has gone by pretty quickly. Not a ton accomplished, but for now we are for sure not going to be running the workshops that we came here to do and have to do other projects that we think will be useful. Stacey is busy working on some brochures for the locals about specific health care concerns that our colleagues here at Bina Hill think are not adequately being addressed (cervical cancer screening and nutrition). I have been helping the Medex here with his malaria prevention program and am trying to teach him how to use excel and other computer programs because while he is very knowledgeable when it comes to health care, he does not have much experience with computers. I also got to visit a health post for the first time yesterday AND rode a motorcycle for the first time ever! The health post was pretty barren and we didn't get to go until the end of the day, so there wasn't a whole lot going on. But I did get a chance to talk to the Community Health Worker for that town and get a bit more of a sense of how things work around here. I rather enjoyed the motorcycle ride there and back also :-) I think I'm going to see if I can go to the regional health centre in Annai and maybe shadow the Medex there for a day or so before I leave also.

Anyways, todays pictures are going to be of surfing :-) I still want to explain surf camp and where we were staying, but there's a lot to talk about so I'll save that for another day.
Here we are carrying our boards. This is the easiest way to carry the longboards, but it was doable by yourself if you needed to.
You can see us walking down the beach a little bit here. The beach we surfed at was about a 15 minute walk from the camp because there was too much reef (aka rocks) at the camp. The picture is taken from camp and the beach is quite a bit beyond the first point you see there but before the point you can see in the distance.
And here I am surfing! I like this one because I knew my picture was being taken and therefore was smiling, but it's not much of a wave so here's another one.
This actually looks like a decent sized wave I guess. Believe me when I say the waves seemed a lot bigger when we were actually doing it! Although I suppose when we were first catching them they were because they would have gotten smaller by the time I got standing up.
And here I am heading in. I would usually spend 1-2 hours in the water and I went twice a day (some people would forgo twice a day and just go once some days, but I am way too stubborn and was determined to get good at it :-P) This is also how the board was carried alone. My arms weren't quite long enough though, so when they got tired, sometimes I would carry it like this:
Pretty convenient, but after a while my head would start to hurt so I had to switch it up pretty regularly. Every once in a while my instructor, Brett, would be heading back at the same time as me and we'd trade boards. It was WAY easier to carry the short boards, that's for sure!

Anyways, I guess that's all for today! Since it's a holiday tomorrow I don't know whether the office will be open or whether the internet will be turned on. If it is I'll try to update, but otherwise, have a great weekend!

Kaila