Wednesday 3rd June. D-Day

Sorry about the delay in posting. Reliving the internet frustrations very, very frequently at the moment and it is not just the operator (i.e. me!!)

Morning fish in Teaoraereke.

Well we can just summarise today as being a very successful first day in a new venue. We set up down in the Betio Sports Complex which is very centrally placed in the centre of the Betio islet, and is essentially bordered by housing. Betio is the site of the Battle of Tarawa in World War II, and has numerous war relics including old bunkers, battle guns and rusting ship and amphibious craft debris. It also apparently has a higher population density than Hong Kong and very few buildings are double storey!

Leesa and Helen with the US Navy (& army) team.

Some highlights: meeting up as a new team after months of planning!, chatting with local children as they watched and waited for their dogs, dogs starting to stream through the doors! Thanks to Hornsby Veterinary Hospital (HVH) in Sydney for their generous donations of surgical instruments and consumables which was put to good use today. And we loved being able to send dogs home with AMRRIC collars. We were delighted at how appreciative local people were at getting their dogs (and 1 pig!) desexed.

In the sports stadium working hard.

We desexed 8 females and 13 males (dogs) and had to turn a few customers away at the end as we had to finish for sports practices after 3pm.

The evening was memorable for our microwaved lean cuisine dinners (night number 3!) taking over 2 hours to be delivered from being heated in the kitchen (the next door supermarket has a freezer full of them and very cheap!), and tackling the ever elusive internet connections. Needless to say in-house wifi, internet café wifi, laptop skype, and internet café skype connections were all hoped for but eluded us. Ho hum, will try again tomorrow…

A bright happy customer with AMRRIC collar!

A part of the family off home.

The problem we are trying to address with our volunteer work.
Dogs cause real community nuisance apart from all the public health issues.