I'm Hani the human and this is my blog.
Chapter 01 of my work in progress book "Sinking Streets".
Chapter 02 - Doorways to the Sea
Chapter 03 - The Laadheenee Among Us
I am floating on my back with my eyes closed. The sun is beating down on my face from above. The rumbling monster of the city is silenced and for a moment I forget about the stress that brought me here. The fresh morning air is tainted with the smell of diesel. I exhale and sink further down under the water’s surface.
During my time at the Marine Research Centre of the Maldives as a research trainee, I was fortunate enough to go along on one of their reef-fish tagging expeditions to Baa Atoll in February of 2009.
We would go out with the fishermen on their fishing trips during which we would record the daily catch, tag specimens and retrieve tags from specimens which had been released earlier.
We would almost always leave in the early twilight hours and would often not return until it was nearly midnight; dropping off hundreds of kilos of fish to one of the many resorts in the atoll.
For me the most interesting part about all this was not how they catch tons of fish with their hands, instead of nets or rods, or even how they get paid next to nothing by greedy resort operators (more on that later in this article), it was how they would almost always start off the cycle with nothing.
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