Islands part II - The last frogs of Lipe

The second half of our trip was to Lipe island.

This half was was most spent doing an indepth research project, in thai, about development on the island! My group studied waste management on the island. (which turned out to be a really amazing thing to study because it was at a pivotal point in the islands history). The island is about a mile long, and it has 1,800 bungalos on it for starters (2/3 of those have been put up in the last three years). Its flat, used to be forested, has patches of gorgeous white sand beach, and has a village where the Urak Lawoi people live. There are also many Urak Lawoi who sold their land years and years ago and now the new owners want to develop it and are kicking them off the land, so they live in squatter towns. There is a walking street with tons of restaurants, dive shops, internet cafes ect.

Until a couple years ago all the waste on the island was burned, buried, or left on the beach for the tide to take out to sea. But waste has become a huge problem. The island produces 2.2 metric tons of waste a day!!! Just in the last year, a waste management / collection system was started and a lot is now shipped off the island. Finding out alla bout it was fascinating, and we interviewed people from all parts of the process… its was like solving a mystery!! Sometime we would think we heard something but not believe it- like once we though we were miscommunicating because some people were telling us they fed the trash to ducks, then we found out there were ducks that were bought to eat some of the food waste (only there were 20, then ten choked on trash and died).

In two weeks, when we get our learning journals back I’ll type up some of the short essays I wrote in the island.

One evening I made friends with a bunch of Thai girls, who were spinning poi on the beach in front of the massage place they worked for. I tried, and failed terribly, at teaching them the 5 beat weave, but it was tons of fun. (Poi is what I did for circus club, were you spin (traditionally flaming) balls at the ends of strings around your body in complex patterns) We stayed up late hanging out at their place, and they invited me to sleep over, but I didn’t thinkt hat would be ISDSI protocol so they walked me across the island home.

Development on the island was so sad. It happened so unbelievably fast. Even as we visited trees fell, and resorts went up. We saw several restaurants go from frames to open in a week. Bulldozers worked all night. The night we arrived the islands only wetland (in the middle of the island, between us and town ) was a light with massive bonfires burning the fallen trees. As we found our way down the rutted dirt road hundreds of frogs fled the swamp, knocking into our legs. Their shinny bodies glistening in the moonlight, and fire light. For days they hopped aimlessly around the resort. The last frogs of Lipe island. The super ironic thing was our resort had about a hundred frog shapped trash cans