Friday the 13th!

Bula everyone, Shakeel here. Apologies for the infrequent posts, but we've been spending all day out in the villages at the work, and haven't had much chance to go where we can connect. We're in Savusavu today on a rest day, and so you'll see a few updates from the team soon...

Our team is having a great time. We're working crazy hard, learning a lot, building relationships, and sharing the highs and lows - with the lows mostly involving cold showers and supersized arthropods, although we consider the various giant 6- and 8-legged furry creatures we're sharing our rooms with more as mascots and compatriots than adversaries.

Anyway, last Friday, the 13th, was a big day for all three villages. On Friday it felt to me that all of our prep work, including the work our team has done over the last several months back home, the frantic prep work here in Buca Bay, the organizing, the materials purchasing, planning with the village residents, training sessions, redesigns, and re-redesigns; all of that all really fell into place. In Buca the villagers installed the first length of the 4-inch main village distribution pipe, in Loa the villagers built the three worst in-village pipeline fixes, and in Vunikura we routed their new supply pipeline up over a particularly tough angle along a jungle hillside, both before and after a crazy (in a good way) tough awesome river crossing.

The residents of each of the villages are on board, working hard, and having fun themselves building their new water infrastructure. They've caught on and jumped on the work so quickly that we're really starting to feel the momentum building. We'll post photos and details about the projects in the next few posts.

Moce (goodbye) for now!