Hot and Slow

The months surrounding Christmas and the new year are what volunteers in Fiji refer to as 'the slow months'. The name comes not because time moves more slowly, which would make matters infinitely worse, but because everyone in Fiji seems to do things at a pace more ponderous than usual. This, coupled with the fact that everyone here is already on 'Fiji time' to begin with, makes getting anything done nigh impossible. I don't know the cause of this phenomenon, but I think it's a combination of the heat, the holidays, and the fact that it's the middle of summer. It's going to take me a while to get used to the inverted seasons. I'll be surprised if I can adjust to 95° heat in the middle of January by the time my service ends.

You might be wondering what exactly the picture I posted above is. If you guessed Macrobrachium rosenbergii, or freshwater prawns, you are correct. Aquaculture is a modestly sized industry on my island, and a fair amount of people have fish or prawn farms. In early December I went and helped a farmer to harvest his prawn pond, it was interesting. Harvesting the prawns was really easy, he just drained the pond and we scooped them up out of the mud when the water level was low enough. There's a link to some more pictures under the 'photos' tab, up there^.

My office gets a lot of requests from farmers and villages for aid in setting up prawn or fish ponds. My office is rather understaffed and under funded,  so we can't respond to many of them. Even if we could, they would have a difficult time stocking the ponds as the only source of fry and post larvae (baby fish and prawns, respectively) is a hatchery located on the bigger island to the south of us, Viti Levu. The current prawn and fish farmers get their starting stock shipped to them from there, but never in the quantities they want. The guy who owned the prawn farm that I helped to harvest started with 2000 post larvae, which yielded 64 kg of prawns. Last season he was able to get 4000 post larvae and harvest 140 kg, but that was still less than he wanted. Ideally, he wants 10,000. I've talked to a few other farmers, and this is a common problem. The Ministry of Fisheries has made a few tentative attempts at starting a hatchery on this island, but lack of funding and a formal development plan have stalled their efforts. I just started working on a project proposal to get the development back under way, its going to take a while though. Good thing I have 18 more months. Well, 14, discounting the slow months...