Last night there was a meeting in town about the proposal of a national preserve in Bahia Magdalena. This is different from the small marine protected area that the fishermen are setting up. This large reserve is completely funded and proposed by the Mexican government. It's Mexico's 200th anniversary of independence, so they want to have 200 national parks. The park they want to make includes only the outer islands that create the mouth of the bay and the waters on the Pacific side of the islands. Fishermen are really worried because they think that the government means to close the inside of the bay to fishing, which is where all of the fishermen go. They also think that the school is involved in the process, or that we're spies for the US government or something. So Gustavo and the professors went to the meeting to explain to the town what we're doing. So this morning Gustavo and Brady held a meeting with us to explain the results. Basically, they think we shouldn't worry about it too much, but they're going to ramp up community involvement and education about our mission.

Today was another DR day. We set up some questions for the coop's biologist who was supposed to come visit campus. He was supposed to come almost 4 hours ago and so far hasn't shown up, so we don't have a lot of faith in that. But we did get an interview with another fisherman in town. Eduardo's wife Guadalupe came with us to translate. She's lived in both Mexico and the US as a kid, so she's pretty perfectly bilingual. She was a really good translator, telling us exactly what he said when we needed her to, and rephrasing and explaining our questions when needed. It seems I've also fixed some of my Spanish problems. Apparently I was asking the questions too quickly, and according to Guadalupe the vocabulary we're using is a bit too much for some of the fishermen, since a lot of them haven't even been to high school.

Tonight I have to go out with some of the girls to volleyball to try to get some interviews with housewives. These interviews are for the mini project in AJ's class, about the professional women. It's funny, they're easy in comparison to the DR interviews since it's a larger population and we only have 5 quick questions for the women. AJ suggested we bring a bunch of Cokes and a sign saying "house wife interviews" lol. I'm just feeling a little spanish-ed out. All day I've been either translating something into Spanish or trying to understand someone else's Spanish and my brain's in a weird place. So I'm a little grateful that the biologist didn't show up, it's given me a little bit of a break.