I feel like my life have been taken over by crustaceans. Not just the little cute scampies in my bathroom, but also bigger, uglier, and tastier ones for our project supported villages.
Over 14 months have passed since the tsunami and most of the village cleaning, rice paddy fencing are pretty much finished. Our program and every other donor and relief organization are moving into the next phase where we’re helping villages identify livelihood opportunities and establishing small micro-credit schemes. Since most of villages are near the sea, aquaculture is a big area of development.
2 weeks ago, we started a pilot program of fattening meat crabs in 3 of our villages on the northern coast. About 500 kilos of crabs arrived and were placed into cages half submerged in water, where they’ll be fed fish heads and other goodies for the next 6 weeks to 3 months (depending on size) before they’re sold to restaurants in downtown Banda Aceh and perhaps even Medan. This program wasn’t the most well thought out (that’s why I think all the crabs will die). When I visited, the villagers had placed crabs of different sizes into the same cage – and as we all know, crabs are cannibals. I don’t know how good of a chance those little crabbies stand in surviving. The villagers also did not request for any kind of scale for weighing the crabs before/after fattening. So, who knows if this pilot program is really worthwhile? We’ll see how that one goes.
Looking for crab to show us
checking for the fullness of the crab
On Sunday, I went to the villages of Saney about 1.5 hours down the west coast to prepare for the ConocoPhillips VIP visit that took place the following day. Some of you may already know, our project has 4 private sector partners, CP is one of them and they support 5 of our villages. Since we knew the villagers were going to serve the President of CP lobsters caught offshore, we decided it was only right to sample the fare as part of our thorough preparation process. We had lobster noodle for lunch - probably $50 worth of lobster over 50 cents worth of instant noodles…delish, nevertheless!
From Cage...
...to my plate
Saney was pretty rich before the tsunami, since its fishermen regularly pulled in $300 - $500 worth of marketable seafood every week. We’re hoping in the next few months to help the fishermen to build better holding cages and perhaps even getting some kind of cooling facilities into the village so they can store caught lobsters and fish for longer and package them for long distance shipping.
What the???
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