8 Days of Pelelu Tepu; Day 7

4:23 AM might seem early, but it’s easy to be entertained these days. While I waited for 7:00 AM to head to the river and take a bath, I watched YouTube videos of Peter McKinnon and Mango Street. Most of the goals on our to-do list for research here in Tepu are checked, so I had a lot of free time on my hands.

I had to be creative with how I wanted to spend all this time. After I bathed and had breakfast, I jumped into my hammock, fired up my laptop and started studying. That was until we — my boss and I — were about to stalk B.O. Thomas. B.O. stands for Bestuursopzichter, which is his job title. I didn’t look into the proper translation in English and I honestly didn’t really feel like it... lazy day. We had an appointment with Thomas yesterday, but he was nowhere to be found and later that day quite busy. We needed to ask him a few questions in order to finish our research.

Later, I learned that the appointment had been moved to today 6:00 PM. At that point, I knew had about 8 hours to kill. Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro came in handy. I am working on some concepts and I'm very excited to actually do something with them. Most of the free time I had was spent studying for my exams. Also, since we didn't have much to do today, I needed to think of a way to still take pictures of parts of the village that I had not yet captured. As I wandered through the village on my own, I had the time to actually focus on what I wanted to capture, so many of the pictures came out exactly as I wanted them to.

Apart from all the computer and camera work, there was some time left for a 3-hour nap. When I woke up, it was time to meet Thomas. The Captain, as the current head of the village is called here, joined us to answer a few questions. It took longer to finish than we thought, but we also got some information we didn't plan on getting, which is great. As this was the highlight of the day, I supposed my day was nearly over, but I was wrong. After I took my usual bath in the river, I went to the kitchen to have dinner and then we watched a movie from a portable beamer with the rest of the guys.

Now the day was over. All that's left now is sleep and half of tomorrow before I head back home.