Working on the island with Mark and Piko has been really great so far. It’s about the same size as Hithaadhoo but it does have a lot more trash and coconut shells, which means more spots for mosquitos to breed. We started work on Monday because of the election, giving us one less day to get the project going but wasted no time in getting meetings and school presentations together. After meetings with members of the health post, island council, women’s committee, and the school we had gained support from several members of the community. The women’s committee stepped up right away and said they would like to keep working on the program once our team leaves. It was great to see that they are so eager in making sure the project continues!

By the second day on the island we had finished up presentations to most of the school kids and had a group of 12 boys join us for survey that same afternoon. They were all very helpful, hard workers who were more than willing to climb up onto tanks to check for larvae. We also had women from the women’s committee and Zumair, a representative from the Health Post help us on survey. Everyone has been showing up every day since and I hope that next week we’ll be able to focus more on breaking into smaller teams and getting more homes done because more people will have been trained to search for mosquito breeding spots.

The island trash clean up is tomorrow and I am sure that we are going to have a good turn out o both kids from the school as well as adult community members. Let’s just hope it doesn’t rain like it has for the last two clean ups.