After the communications workshop last week, I travelled to another nearby workshop, this time on the more interesting subject of turtles.
The week long workshop was held in a village called Nakalou which is a two hour drive along a dirt road from the main city in Vanua Levu, Labasa.
In terms of Fijian villages Nakalou is pretty large, it has about 80 houses and 346 people – when I asked someone this they said that they had been figuring it out the other day with their friend, they knew the names of everyone in the village.
The village has a generator that is switched on between 8pm and 10pm other than that there is no electricity – this means no refrigerators or, of course, hot water. In fact there were no showers, only taps.
I have to emphasise the heat at this point. The village is in the middle of the jungle which blocks out any wind and there are no fans. Combine this with a constant 34°c heat and 95% humidity and you will find yourself in an incredibly uncomfortable position. At no point during my stay was I ever dry, let’s put it that way.
We all stayed in a house that had kindly been donated to us by the village and all but a couple of us slept on the bare floor – we had to borrow the outdoor toilet of a house just down the hill (there are no indoor toilets).
This workshop was conducted solely in Fijian so my involvement in the workshop itself was again very limited. Unlike the village we conducted the communications workshop in, the people of Nakalou speak far less English. Some people, like the Chief, didn’t speak a word – NOTHING. This made things very interesting.
The language barrier, however, was not a barrier to their kindness or hospitality. After the first day I would walk through the village and constantly hear people shout, “MACIU!!!” (my name in Fijian) followed by a warm and sincere introduction. How everyone knew my name I have no idea but it was great. Those that couldn’t speak English would get a friend that did to translate.
Evenings in the village were characterised by an immense amount of Grog consumption until the very early hours.
Grog (aka Cava or Waka) is a root plant that is dried (in Fiji) then pounded into a powder and mixing with water to create a brown dirt flavoured drink that is a mild sedative.
I am told that in Vanuatu they don’t dry the roots and instead create a Grog rocket fuel that gets you ‘doped’ after only a couple of bowls, however, in Fiji the mix is weak which means you are required to drink literally litres of the stuff and personally it makes me feel a bit sick. The doped feeling is nice though.
On the second day I went to the pig sty with the intention to take a few pictures which very quickly drew a large crowd. I think that they were trying to give me something interesting to photograph or maybe they were bored or even hungry but I soon heard the hysterical squeal of one of the 10 or so piglets that were housed in small three by four foot pens.
It was soon clear what was happening and I ran over to witness what was a first for me.
One guy grabbed its back feet his left hand and its front in the right. The other guy grabbed its snout shut and with the other speared it in the throat with a machete.
After a bit of thrusting and slicing the pig started to loose energy and once it ceased to struggle they let go. This was probably the most disturbing part.
With the guy holding the piglets snout shut it couldn’t make much noise but when they let go you could hear it, half dead, trying to gasp for air. The gurgling sound wasn’t nice.
Following this they hoisted it up onto a tree stump, placed a few dried palm tree leaves up against it and set it all on fire to burn off all its hair etc…
The third day of the workshop was turtle day.
Up to this point the workshop has covered the topic of species identification, turtle conservation and general turtle information including movements, feeding and reproduction patterns but the third day was the practical.
On the night of the first day a fisherman went out and caught a turtle (a Green Turtle for those interested) and on the second day he caught another two (both also Green), one of which was MASSIVE – one-point-three-meters-long massive actually.
The two small turtles were taken up to the village where a demonstration in flipper tagging was given. After they were set free the larger one was transported into an awaiting pickup truck to be transported across the country to be satellite tagged.
Now… I had a great time at the village and I absolutely LOVE turtles. They are desperately in need of conservation and educating local communities is definitely a good way to go about it (considering how they have a habit of eating them in the Pacific)… BUT… there were a few things about the workshop that I wasn’t so happy with.
The workshop was organised and paid for by the WWF but we invited two other speakers to help present. One guy was from Papa New Guinea and the other from Samoa.
This partnership between organisations causes problems with consistency and I witnessed some quintessential mixed messaging.
The first part of the workshop talked about the need to leave turtles alone especially when they are nesting. These messages included:
- Do not interfere with a females coming up a beach to nest.
- Do not use torches (turtles nest at night) as it will scare them off and they may dump their eggs in the sea.
- Do not dig up eggs
- Do not interfere with hatchlings as they emerge from the sand because this may interfere with their homing ability (turtles return to the very same beach that they hatched from to nest)
However the second part of the workshop talked about turtle monitoring and tagging and this is where the contradictions started. Messages here included:
- When females nest go and measure their length and tag their flippers. Light is also clearly needed for this.
- Monitor the number of eggs laid. This involves either being present while the turtle lays them or digging them up and re-covering them afterwards.
- Count the number of turtles to hatch. If this cannot be done easily by eye and it was recommended that you pick them up, put them in a basket, count them and then return them to the beach.
Another thing that deeply disturbed me is something that is inevitable in some types of conservation and often in science – X is not allowed unless for scientific research.
This was demonstrated to me at the workshop when, in order to demonstrate turtle tagging and species identification, turtles were caught and displayed for the group.
The first turtle was caught at night, we went down to see it the following afternoon where we found it bone dry and upside down in the sun on the beach.
The tagging class was not due until the next day meaning that the turtle was left on the beach for another day and, personally, I was not happy about that. Having expressed by disapproval and my fear that we are setting a bad example the decision was made that, because they are so hard to catch, we would keep it.
I wasn’t happy with the ‘do as we say, not as we do’ mentality.
