Being an NGO, GForce gets invited to local festivals to talk to other NGOs and locals about what we’re doing. In fact the WWF were at the ‘water festival’ we were at yesterday. Miserly mean-spirited bunch. None of their staff could explain why it was more important for them to have the www.wwf.com domain than the superstars of sports entertainment who bring joy into millions of peoples’ homes. So what if a few grannies can’t pledge sixty pence to help some frigid pandas? What’s worse – a panda with one less viagra pill, or a poor disabled redneck school truant who can’t keep up with the latest news of his favourite wrestlers? Extensive mid-western research has shown that some rednecks actually don’t have cable television, or can’t get their ‘third uncle cousin’ to fix the decoder so they get free pay-tv. Though I find it hard to believe that they could be any redneck without WWF, you have to think that these disadvantaged kids may exist, and deserve a website. Forget the stinky stoned animals.

So we were at the ‘water festival’ in force, about an hour’s bus ride away from Kota Kinabalu. The festival seemed to get its name from the fact that the various local stars performed Abba and Britney covers from a floating stage in a murky pond. It was quite good fun, not least as I love listening to interpretations of Shakira’s lyrics by non-English speakers, but also because there was lager available, something I certainly didn’t expect at the primarily muslim festival. There were also tourist police, whose job was to make sure you were having fun (like the Fun Police only with more comical hats). But by far the funniest part of the whole affair was when one of the volunteers decided to have his first swim. The locals were quite excited when he entered the water, and Jo interpreted their waving as the usual friendly greeting you might get from our Malaysian hosts. It was not until the box jellyfish had stung his face, and he was being whisked to hospital in the ambulance with needles in his arms that he figured that they may have been trying to tell him something about the water’s inhabitants.