SCUBA Dooba Doo!

I can’t believe I haven’t written a post about this yet! It’s hands-down the most worthwhile, awesome thing I’ve done in country to date.

There’s a lakeside resort between Robert and Melissa’s sites, called Kande Beach. It’s a popular spot among PCVs for big parties, and coincidentally, where we spent most of our time back during our Language Intensive week in training (its steps down the beach from where we were staying). Somehow, someone in Tonga Land got wind that the owner of the dive school at the resort, an ex-PCV, was doing research on the cichlid population in the area and needed help with the bimonthly underwater surveys. Cichlids, in case you didn’t know, are freshwater fish, and Lake Malawi is famous for having the most species of cichlids of anywhere. Anyway, as PCVs living nearby and sticking around for a good chunk of time, we were his prime candidates for helping him with the surveys. He doesn’t have time to run the dive school AND keep up on the surveys. We, of course, jumped at the opportunity at the intense envy of every other PCV in the country.

Robert and I spent our Christmas holiday break getting dive certified at the resort, which was AWESOME in itself. Justin (the owner) gave us a great deal ($180 usd for the course) and let us crash for free in his guest house. I got to take impromptu cooking lessons from his wife, Joy, who made the most unbelievable BBQ’d pork chops. That week an Overlander (a huge tourist truck Azungu foreigners pile into and take across Africa, mostly as a drinking tour) had brought in a bunch of cases of Tanzanian beer, called Kilimanjaro, which was an amazing break from the Carlsberg shit we have here. And learning to dive in the lake was perfect! No scary man-eating or poisonous things to freak me out, no salt water getting into every orifice, familiar water. Oh man! And the cichlids!!! They’re everywhere! And they’re awesome! So many, and in the most impossible colors.

One of the most memorable dives during the training was when Justin took us out to see an old jeep the previous owner sunk with a huge tree trunk. A fishing net had gotten tangled around the branches of the tree and a huge school of small white silvery fish were weaving in and out and all around us. The effect was like a really beautiful lonely underwater snowfall. I wanted to paint it! I can’t paint!

But the surveys themselves are also really awesome. We’ve all spent the last few weeks learning to identify all the different species of cichlids in the area (there’s about 40 to 50 we need to know for this time of year). We dive down in pairs and take turns slowly swimming along a transect line for about ten minutes, ticking off the fish we see on our underwater fish chart (with a pencil, actually! Pencils work well underwater). Each person does each transect twice before surfacing, with a total underwater time of about an hour, depending on how much air you use. It’s really awesome knowing the fish I’m seeing. It makes me feel like I’m not a tourist in the water either. And helping Justin out, it’s a project I can do in my service with tangible results that are legitimately helpful. So much of what I do in Malawi is guesswork with questionable lasting influence and possibly useless or detrimental effects. The data I help collect for Justin helps him find overfishing and climate change trends. He’s in the process of trying to put together a long-lasting sustainable cichlid study, instead of the 2-5 year studies that are common. Me helping him do this, while unbelievably awesome in itself, is also surprisingly satisfying in terms of my service. It can be converted into numbers on a spreadsheet with a total at the end and a smiley face, a little dose of definitive Western order. Try doing that with my other projects. No total at the end of “how many people have changed their attitude towards condom use as a direct result of your presence in their village for two years”. And a smiley face? Forget about it.

Diving could very well be the highlight of this whole Peace Corps Malawi deal. And we’ve brought Justin a lot of business. A group of southern volunteers are coming up next month to get certified with him. And diving has become high on our list of things to do while traveling anywhere. Next month we’re turning a small trip to northern Mozambique into a huge trip to southern Mozambique to hit up some of the best ocean diving in the world. We’ll be swimming with whale sharks! More to come!