First two days at work on Ubin..

I have never felt so anxious about work in my entire life. Perhaps, this time its because this job involves my future = honours project!!! I arrived early and decided that the best time to leave my home was indeed 645am or slightly earlier at 635am. When I arrived at the village, it was still super early. There was hardly a soul there!

Initially, I felt pretty awkward. Like I wasn't doing anything productive. In face, I felt pretty demoralized after a few moments of standing and staring, using my 'eye power' coz I just had no idea how to clear a window or set up a mist net. Soon, it boiled down to lots of muscle power ( to clear the vegetation with parangs and power pruners) and campcraft skills aka girl guides style. Worst still was that I had a supervisor that wasn't exactly providing much supervision.

However, just as I was about to sink into 'depression' mode, A came in with a question " Do you feed animals?" and I was like "er..no? What kindda animal?". And out came a baby musang aka civet cat aka toddy cat aka addidas as J called it. Call it pet therapy or something, but I felt much better after playing with it. I got to see it poo AND pee. HAhaha...

I also got to have a good chat with J on the way home. Although younger than I, J seemed to be really spiritually mature. J talked about the most important thing in Christianity being having a relationship with God. I was like whoa! And then J asked me this qs: " So what are your spiritual gifts?" And I was like..."er...ah....". Oh Lord, how can it be thAt I don't even know? I told J it was speaking in tongues but I think J didn't hear what I said and went on to explain what spiritual gifts meant. I believe deep inside I knew the definition, its just that I have never really thought about what my spiritual gifts were. could it be encourgement? Could it be creativity? What could it be? Lord, show me what you have for me? Gifts that I can share and bless others with!

The pace of 'work' life there is actually rather slow. The most 'gan cheong' time I wld say would be when we are out in the field. Today we set up the mist nets for bird ringing. Bird ringing involves capturing birds and attaching rings to their feet. Possibly to determine bird diversity and check on the birds' health. That's like how cool can!!!!!!!! First day at work and I get to do such exciting stuff! Went to recce the place first and learnt how to do some pretty destructive pruning, in order to make space for 'windows' for the birds to fly through.

And finally on the second day, we got to catch the birds! Among the catch were Ashey Tailorbirds, Olive-backed sunbirds, copper-throated sunbirds, mangrove magpie, Collared kingfisher, the noisy Stork-billed kingfisher, White rump shama, scarlet flower pecker, Emerald dove, Scaly breasted munia, black head munia and the rare Mangrove Pitta who carries one mean tune! We measured the vital statistics of each bird before allowing the epidemologists( people who study diseases) to do their job in collecting cloacca(the anal region of the bird) swabs to be sent for bird flu tests!!!!!!How cool is that! Oh..and as usual, there were so many people picking durians around the island today. Shall bring my camera there tmr to snap pics!!!! Tmr's task is to know the entire island plus some villagers!!! Which is a frightening task in my personal opinion but I guess I've got to brave and step out and just TALK! Time to leave my shell!