Back on South Caicos

I'm back on South Caicos after a whirlwind of a trip to Boston! I successfully completed my 80-hour WFR (Wilderness First Responder) course, which was intense but extremely useful and really interesting. It was also a great refresher, as I hadn't revisited much of the material we covered since my last WFR course three years ago. There were 10 of us enrolled in the course, including the SAM at SFS's Costa Rica center (pictured below, at left), and another SFS staffer who will become the SAM at SFS's debut program in Bhutan during the summer of 2010 (she's the blond with the bag over her shoulder). The three of us exchanged a few tricks of the trade while we were there!


I also managed to do a heck of a lot else while I was in the Boston area. Most importantly, I got to stay with my sister. Our time together was limited because I was in training all day and had a long commute back and forth between the SFS Headquarters in Salem, MA and her apartment near BU, but we went out for bagels together almost every morning and had a little time each night to catch up or make dinner together or watch F.R.I.E.N.D.S.! At the end of my course, my parents drove up to Boston to spend the weekend with us too. As Amanda and I both have summer birthdays, we had a joint celebration that included going to see the movie "Up" in a little theatre in Salem, going to a Red Sox game (they shut out the Toronto blue jays), going out for sushi on our last night, and just spending some good ol' QT together. It really made my whole trip!


By the time I got back here to the TCI, my many nights of inadequate sleep had really caught up with me. I sat down with Brett to unpack all of the items we had ordered online and had delivered to my sister's. (You can't really buy anything here, and now that we're both divers we were in need of some more equipment plus a few other odds and ends.) However, as you can see above, I couldn't keep my eyes open for long. I fell asleep in the middle of all of our new gear and my half-unpacked luggage, while Brett got sidetracked reading the manual for the underwater camera we just bought. (That book on the bed in front of me is a field guide for the birds of TCI that Brett's mom bought for us!) I'd better get rested up and back into the swing of things soon though, because the next batch of students arrive in just 4 days and there's lots to do before they get here!