The Life Aqauatic

So this isn’t exactly the coast nor am I near the lake, and I am definitely not really doing any diving but working near fish ponds is good enough for now. Did I mention I got a red hat? (no speedo..phew).

I am working our here with the World Fish Center. Its an international Org that develops and disseminates aquaculture technologies to increase food security in “developing nations”. (I hate this term…developing nations means to me that there are nations developed and nations that are striving to reach that point…when everyone knows that those that are “developed” are unsustainable and those that aren’t developed could never really uphold the resource consumption levels that are integral to developed nations. I will use 3rd world instead.).

Anyways, work has been incredibly interesting these past few days. I’ve gone over my project plan with various levels of staff, and gotten “buy-in” or approval from those that mattered, which makes me hope that I am heading in the right direction. Often things change, especially in the third world, I know, and it is just that way. Things go wrong, people have other problems and entire projects can get benched…but I will try my best to keep this on track!

I am working on spreading Catfish spawning practices to local farmers in the area. Farmers here, who do the typical agriculture stuff, are approached by World Fish Center, in conjunction with ither the Ministry of Fisheries or with other NGOs , to convert their agriculture farm to one of Integrated Agriculture-Aquaculture. This means that they rear fish on their farm (ergo fish farming) and thier inputs into the pond are farm wastes, like maize bran, goat feces and casava leaves. The manuer and leaves etc compost and add to overall nutrients in the pond from which phyto plankton etc grow which the feed eat....if they don't already feast on leaves or the maize bran.

As for the catfish spawning part. Local farmers usually buy thier stock of fish from the national aquaculture center or the ministry of fisheries, but if they could cause thier fish to spawn then they wouldn't have to "buy" anything. So thats where science and me come in. In Egypt they found a technology using netted cages, hapas, to spawn catfish. Now I am just running an experiement to see if this technology can really fly in Malawi.

As for the scene: picture blue skys, rows of grass encased retangular ponds disappearing into a mountainous horizon. There are a couple of palm trees scattered and a herd of goats that pass through. A red bricked office building lies at the head of all of this and that is where a little office with three windows lies, which is mine. This is my work place.