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© Ryan Collins / WWF-SPPO
Kate Findlay, Fiji
About me...
I love throwing myself into new situations… so when I was accepted for the post of Communications Intern, I boarded the first plane for the South Pacific.
I had the day before graduated, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, with a BSc (Hons) in Zoology. With my head still full of dissertations and textbooks, I wanted to experience how people who work for WWF actually go about their buisiness 'saving the world'. Surely it couldn’t be as dry as my 20 page dissertation…

You can read more about Kate's story at www.fijitimes.com/story.aspx
Kate with a loggerhead turtle which has been satellite tagged. Read more about WWF South Pacific's Marine Species programme at http://www.wwfpacific.org.fj/what_we_do/species/turtles_cfm/

© WWF-SPPO

The job...

As a Communications Intern I was able to try my hand at an entirely new field (apart from the one Science Communications course I took for fun). I re-wrote the entire website, properly baptised the office into the age of social media, toured our field sites with WWF’s head of Asia-Pacific, wrote a weekly column for the national newspaper about what we do at the field sites, and much more besides.

You can read some of my articles using the links to the right.

Fiji!
WWF’s South Pacific Programme Office is based in Suva, Fiji, a small city with a population of 85,000. Probably the friendliest city in the world, be prepared to have your socks knocked off being wished a good morning “yandra” at least once on the way to work in the morning.

Heartbreaking sunsets and life springing from every crack in the concrete or piece of bread in your cupboard are just a features of everyday life in Suva, and it’s bustling nightlife featuring the year past's r’n’b chart hits set to reggae beats will soon suck you in.

Fiji’s population is about half i-Taukei (indigenous Fijian) and half Indo-Fijian (descendents of plantation workers brought over during the British Empire), the benefit of which is double the amount of festivals to celebrate!

While Suva is a brilliant city to live and work in, it is important to note that: Fiji is a developing country and as such safety is a consideration, it does rain fairly frequently (and I’m from Scotland, so I’d like to think I have good authority on the subject of rain!), and unfortunately there’s no beach terribly close by.

Life in Suva

Contact

If you'd like to contact Kate about the Youth Volunteer Programme, you can email her at findlaykate@gmail.com