April 12 - Brook - Up early this morning.... very early, for a breakfast Rotary meeting. It was another combine meeting, with about 3 different clubs present. It was very full with many interesting Rotarians to chat with after. After this we were shuttled to Bombay where we met Rotarian Mark Tregidga who was our host for the day and was helped by Sarah another Rotarian from the Pukekohe club. Mark and Sarah took us to a "posh" diary farm called Enton farms. I h...

April 11 - Brook - Today was a vocational day organized by the Rotary Summerville Howick club. We went to Kidz First at Middlemore Hospital. Here the CEO of the Kidz First organized an individual vocational day for each of us. I spoke with a couple of pediatricians doing research one was looking into RSV rates in New Zealand which are apparently very high, he was very interested in Bethel, Alaska because apparently they have the world's highest rates of RSV. He...

April 10 - Brook - This morning we were driven very early back to Auckland for a group vocational morning at the St. John's Ambulance Headquarters. This was a very interesting morning for me especially. The organization itself is actually a charity and relies on fundraising and partial government funding to provide all of the services including the emergency services. The also do quite a bit more than the standard emergency services, including education and fir...

Vivian: This was our GSE break We have spent Thursday, April 5 until Tuesday, April 10 at Cooks Beach on the Coromandel Peninsula. It takes almost 3 hours to drive here from Auckland and we had new host families at baches close to each other. I am with Graham and Alison Leach for the weekend and for next week. It has been wonderful to rest, and walk on the beach. We have also been with our hosts to Cathedral Cove and Hot Water Beach (both of which were c...

April 9 - Brook - This morning was slightly ealriler than yesterday. My home hosts were planning on going fishing at precisely 9:30am to catch the tides just right. The waves on the beach were still too large to launch the boat off the beach using their tractor so we had to launch the boat into the estuary using the regular boat launch. This is not an easy as one might think. The mouth of the estuary is becomming more and more clogged with sand from the beach dur...