Sorry for the long delay in writing

Sorry for the long delay in writing. My only excuse is that until about 2 days ago there was not much to write about. The trainees for the course came to the center on Friday night, and the training began on Saturday. That morning I got breakfast from the cafeteria, which so far has consisted each morning of flat bread (essentially a pita bread) some cheese, some kind of meat (turkey, or some little sausage like things in a tomato based sauce I think), and possibly jam, cream cheese, or olives. It has all been good. Lunch is served later in the day about 3 o'clock and is the largest meal of the day. The past few days lunch has consisted of a salad, a noodle soup, a vegetable soup that is usually poured over rice, chicken cooked different ways, and beef cooked many different ways. For desert there is fresh fruit and a bottle of "Coka" as they call it.

Saturday there was a demonstration on the methods used to spawn fish and how to artificially spawn catfish fry. I also learned to test the hardness, the alkalinity, the nitrogen content, the dissolved O2 Concentration, the phosphate content, and the amount of photosynthetic materials that are present in the water.

Yesterday in the training I learned how to fertilize the ponds in order to grow the natural foods that fish eat on. I assisted in setting up a catfish predation trial which was being done by the trainees to test the effect of tilapia density on the the rate of predation by catfish. At 6:30 we also went to Abou Hammad to look around and go to the market. I walked with several of the trainees and purchased (with the help of Numa who speaks Arabic) some apricots and an assortment of sweets from a bakery.

Today I helped the trainees clean out the tanks from their trial, the fish had to be counted and weighed to determine the effect of the different treatments on the fish. This took 3 hours to do all 12 tanks. This afternoon we learned how to do proximate analysis of protein, fiber, ash, fat, and carbohydrates. This was really interesting and I am sure that it will be useful in the future in college. We also learned how to determine the sex of small fry under the microscope. Today I also spoke with Dr. Gamal and we decided that my project would be determining differences between the commericial varieties of tilapia and the tilapias that have been selected for in the genetics program here at the center. I will be feeding each type of tilapia fry at three different rates (based on total biomass) and checking the affect of the different rates on the two different varieties.

Thats an account of the past few days from here. Other than that I am really starting to miss home, I miss hanging out with everyone and I miss my family.

Will