Our First Week
This was our first week volunteering on the island, and it has been great. The boat ride over was a bit rough; the yacht is smaller than the one that goes to Roatan so you can really feel the boat going up and down as it crosses the waves. We were a bit sea sick when we arrived, so we took it easy and rested the first day.
We met the volunteer director of BICA, Marina. She's really nice, and she's lived all over the world. She is really pouring her heart and soul into this organization because she loves the environment and especially Utila. She's pretty easy going with the volunteers, so she makes for a good director.
On Tuesday, I got to work right away with website. The old one wasn't bad, but it was painful to update and translate and lacked a few features that this one has. My work on the website kept me busy until today, Saturday. The other volunteers have different projects that they're working on, so we all keep pretty busy.
Overall, we're amazed by how beautiful the island is. It's a bit bigger than I first realized, but a lot of the land is wetlands in the middle. The town is pretty nice, there's a little of everything. We've kept ourselves pretty entertained between the movie rental, the beaches, the clubs, and everything else. We love it here on the island!
It looks like our biggest work going forward is going to be preparing the reserve so that tourists can visit it. To do that, we're going to place a dock and blaze some trails. We might even spend the night out on the reserve one night so we can get more done. It's quite a journey to get to the reserve because it's on the exact opposite side of the island. We have to take a boat around, and it takes over an hour. The waves are pretty big, so our captain has to drive conservatively so we don't tip. Also, we can never stay too long because the longer we're out, the bigger the waves get. If we come back too late in the afternoon, it gets dangerous.
