It’s been decades since most of the group has been on a bike. But bikes here are a vital way of life. You see people carry a bag of coconuts and a kid on their bicycle.
So some volunteers were hesitant when we were invited to do a bike tour throughout the neighbourhood that will use the playground. They live humbly. Laundry hangs on the fence. Dogs run in the street. Kids play in the yard.
They took us on a bucket boat ride. Huh? Well they look like tea cups floating in the water. A much older woman was our driver, she is strong. How do I know that? Well I felt bad that she was rowing us, I took the paddles and I lasted about 10 minutes before my arms were burning.
She took us through a water coconut field. Those are coconut trees with their trunks underwater. Like a game of macabre charades, she acted out how soldiers used to sit in these dense, soggy forests and shoot at helicopters. She made an eerie sound as she used her hands to show how the choppers crashed to the ground.
The boats dropped us off where a man in a colourful costume was waiting. He performed a traditonal dance, a dance to keep the fishermen safe on their journeys. The locals also made us lunch, homemade noodles, greens and shrimp they had just fished out of the water in front of us.
They accepted no money. It was their way of saying thanks.
