[b]Day 1 Sunrise[/b]

Ginger Wilson had spent the first minutes after the plane's crash in total panic. This had been the 16-year-old's first time up in a cargo plane [i]ever[/i], so being in the [i]crash[/i] of one was obviously a unique and frightening experience. 

Her mother, Samantha, was a Nurse who'd been tapped by Carol Kingsley for the mission to Tongalo. Samantha had initially turned down the offer, citing that she and her daughter had only just arrived in their new home of Aukland, New Zealand. They hadn't even begun emptying the boxes cluttering their new apartment.

"I [i]need[/i] you," Carol had begged.

"I can't do that to my daughter," Samantha had countered. "Her father died just six weeks ago, while I was away with you in Africa. We're trying to rebuild. I can't leave her again so soon after."

"Bring her with you," Carol had offered. "Seriously. It's not like Africa. The cyclone was devastating, yes, blowing everything down. But the scale of death and loss of life was actually very minimal. Your daughter's not going to see bodies lying in the streets or skin-and-bone children dying of malnutrition."

When Samantha took the idea to her daughter, Ginger's response had been an emphatic, "[i]Hell, yeah![/i]"

After the initial shock of the wreck, Ginger didn't hesitate to ask her mother, "What can I do to help?"

Samantha didn't want Ginger around the [i]blood and gore[/i] at the medical tents, so she found another Aid Worker to engage the girl in collecting the cargo that was scattered up and down the beach. This was important, of course, but also kind of boring. 

Then Ginger discovered that some of that [i]cargo[/i] wasn't waiting around to be collected but was running around the beach and the forest. Some of the livestock had escaped the plane's cargo hold.

Ginger joined forces with one of the Ag' people, a Māori woman named Tino Hanare, who were trying to recapture the animals that had been released by the C-130's crash landing. They chased after goats and chickens and ducks and lambs and pigs. Most of the animals were young, but there were full grown milk goats and a couple of massive female pigs, too. Some of the animals disappeared into the forest, and while Ginger wanted to chase after them, Tino ordered the kids to stay on the beach until someone from Security had cleared the group for entering the jungle.

Some of the animals -- including one big male pig (or hog?) -- had unfortunately died in the crash. Ginger initially thought that meant they would be buried, but she quickly learned she was so very, [i]very[/i] wrong. The animals that hadn't made it would be [i]gutted[/i] and cooked for the survivors to eat. 

[i]Eww![/i] she initially thought. But then she thought, [i]How's that different than buying a hotdog at 7-11 or a burger at McDonalds?[/i] 

As the eldest of the [i]minors[/i], Ginger recruited some of the other kids to help chase down the escapees. Some of the youngsters -- like some of the adults, too -- were still in shock over the accident, and the last thing they wanted to do was run around chasing animals. But soon enough, as the reluctant ones saw how much fun the bolder children were having, they, too, joined in. 

After the sun had risen in the east, just to the south of the big cliff against which the plane had [i]suddenly and violently[/i] stopped, the real fun of chasing critters began. Every once in a while, a kid would holler out that he or she had cornered something, and the others would go running his or her way to help corral it.

Eventually, there was nothing more to be run down and captured. Still, the kids had done a good job and -- even more important than that, Ginger thought -- they'd gotten their minds off of the crash, the deaths, and the uncertain days ahead.