School Visits and Sea Turtle Conservation

The last two days have been pretty busy. We have officially kicked off the Floating Classrooms season. Yesterday we visited Grand Fond Primary School and today we were at Grand Bay Primary School. Both schools are on the Atlantic side of the island, but their schools and communities were very different. Both schools housed grades K-6, but Grand Bay had twice as many students and a much nicer school that was built by the Canadian government. It also seemed like the people in Grand Bay were more apprehensive about having outside people visit their village where in Grand Fond we felt very welcomed as we drove to the school.
Anyways, let's get back to what we were actually doing in these schools. In November Kara and Mandy came down to Dominica and trained teachers in the Floating Classrooms curriculum. In the next week and a half we will visit the 5th grade classrooms in 9 schools and get the kids excited about what they are going to learn in their class over the next couple of months and the boat trip we are going to take them on in May. We brought a gigantic inflatable whale with us and the kids get super excited about it and the entire school usually runs out and attacks us and the whale. The first two visits were pretty crazy. The kids and communities have been incredible though. When we got to Grand Fond the kids welcomed us with a song and it was adorable. The community in Grand Fond also all donated food and they made us a lunch. It was amazing that they were so giving when they had so little to give. People in our country could learn a lot from them.


After Grand Fond we visited nearby Rosalie Bay. It is a leatherback sea turtle nesting site. Unfortunately it is not leatherback nesting season so we didn't see any turtles, but we did learn about what people are doing to protect them. Poaching of nesting sea turtles in a big problem in the islands. Poachers will wait for the turtles to come ashore and then they will kill them because one leatherback can bring in up to $10,000. To protect the sea turtles they have a cabin set up for patrollers that will watch the beaches night and day for possible poachers. They also have set up a hatchery to protect the eggs. When the mother turtle is done laying her eggs, the patrollers will dig up the eggs and move them to higher ground where there is a fenced in area to protect the eggs from the elements and predators.