It all began at 6 am when I woke up for tea time and walked to the food tent for breakfast! Tea time was so good and breakfast was oatmeal and bananas,even better!!!
(BTW the oatmeal here is some of the best I have ever had in my life, no exageration!)
After we finished eating I decided to race Brandi, the dog, down the hill back down the road. In the process I lossed my shoe twice and Brandi got distracted by another dog so I’m not sure who actually won, but either way it got my blood pumping for the day!
I entered my room and dreaded getting dressed because it was so cold and I was going to wear shorts and a t-shirt that day due to our ministry. Finally, I got dressed and ran over to the next room with the rest of our team in it. I was so excited for the day; I have no idea why I was so excited but I was!
So if you didn’t catch on by the title our task for the day was to go mud fishing with our bare hands because there’s apparently an overpopulation of fish in the pond!!!
We arrive to the pond and realize that they are still draining the water so we hopped over to the chapel that is being built so that we can continue passing buckets of dirt to build up the stage area as we wait on the pond.
Once they were ready we went back over to the pond where we saw many people on the sides waiting for the fishing to begin. Soon we discovered a cylender bin that had some fish from the pond in it that had already been caught. Let me tell you, these fish were gigantic!!! I was expecting normal sized fish but these were monsterous, and to top it all off we heard that there were leeches in the pond!
As the pond continued to slowly drain a group of the men from the community entered the pond to begin fishing! It was quite a scene to watch! We all watched at first and then left for luch, but many came back after luch as well. When we came back we all started off just watching, but then some people decided to get in and help as well. No shame, I was not one of the people to go hand fishing in the muddy pond with potential leeches, but I did watch!
There were many different tactics used to try and catch the fish, such as herding them towards a huge net, slapping the water with a stick to get them to jump to the surface, cornering them in the pond, and of course just seeking them out and trying to grab them. Supprisingly all of these worked at least once!
And just to set the scene even more there were locals watching, we were watching, kids were running around waiting for fish to come so they could take them to the bin, fires were being tended for those in the water to get warm after they got out, and a group of people making tea for everyone with coconut cookies! Who ever thought that mud fishing could bring a whole community together! It was such a fun time, and I will definitley never forget that day!
