Hi everyone, time is funny sometimes...a couple of days of travelling can seem like a month while a couple of weeks of staying in one place can seem like a day or two. hence, i have trouble recalling what has happened in the last couple or few weeks because life has fallen into a nice rhythm of work and hammocks and food.
i am still at santa martha animal refuge and am planning (oh plans and how they change) on staying another week before packing the pack and heading out again.
this last week has been good, very good, and i am sure that week four will be even better. as i become more competent and confident around the animals and just generally with the way things work there is more time to look around and notice where i am and what is going on around me.
a few things we did in the last couple of weeks:
one of the woolly monkeys died. we didn´t know why and he had been totally fine, but after an autopsy preformed by gloudina and two chilean veterinary students the cause of death was put down as poisoning. and, because he escaped the week before for just a day, this explanation makes a sad sort of sense; having never been in the wild, he may not have known what to eat and what not to eat. this was a demonstration to me at least of why it is so important to try and create the most natural environment possible for these animals and to actively seek release possibilities in areas where they will be safe from hunters.
we did more work on the dam...there has not been very much rain lately and so our water pressure has been quite low. we built the dam higher by filling sacks with clay and then cementing them in place. hopefully it will work out better this way.
friday night called for an epic everybody plays everybody else table tennis tournament on the dining room table. unfortunately, my mad skills let me down and i came second to last out of seven. bummmmer
it is carnaval time right now in ecuador (in a lot of places i think) so saturday night in baños was crazy. it was like a foam war zone with everyone running around with cans of spray foam. nobody was immune, old women, small children, no one.
this week gloudina sat us down to tell us that johnny, a local entrepreneur who has basically supported the foundation out of his own pocket, will not be able to provide us with any more funding because of his own financial situation. thus, the fate of the centre is a bit up in the air at the moment and brainstorming for ideas of how to get fruit for the animals at lower prices and how to get more volunteers and just generally how to get more money is high on our to-do list every day. if anyone as any good ideas, we would love to hear about them!!
well, i am sure that this week will just fly by and then i will be off, most likely travelling with an australian girl who has also been working at the centre. our current plan (it is become the p-word) is (get out your ever handy map of northen south america) to head north to coca, ecuador, from where we will catch a boat through the amazon to iquitos, peru. from there we will head to the coast of peru before beelining back up through ecuador in order to get to colombia, panama and all the rest. you know how it goes.
i hope everyone is well and that there is light at the end of the winter tunnel.
love mer

glen with two of the four puppies
the baby armadillo who has to be forced fed grasshopper guts by syringe
kids from the family and andy watching gloudina feed the armadillo
we saw another tarantula...smaller by about half but it stuck around for a couple of hours

ricky trying to play with a puppy
kitty and a puppy

ricky the dog was chasing something while we were sitting around the campfire one night and i looked down to see what it was and there was the tarantula. the cigarette is for sizing.
one of the boys from the family in the lagoon by the house
we went for a jungle walk

kitty
the kitchen
katia´s monkey bite one week later

this is where i am

http://www.santamartharescue.org/
i am at the flor de la amazonia release centre, not the centre near to quito

dawn on the amazon
the absolutely incredible view from the centre.
sunset on the amazon

the hammock slash fire hang out shelter
natasha with my book as she steals my hammock spot.
katia with her bandaged hand at breakfast

the iguana that i found that had apparently had escaped a month or so ago
gloudina catching the iguana
one of the flightless macaws that hangs around the houses and gets in the way. they are hilarious

little fucker
the big capuchin monkey cage (not the one where we were attacked)
capuchin monkey known as little fucker.

the devils falls just at the beginning of the bike ride.
after the killer bike ride looking suitably dead.
above baños

me at the ingapilca ruins
alpacas at the ingapilca ruins near cuenca.
the valley outside of banos where we went biking. it was a 60 km bike ride and was really hard and poured pretty much the whole time.

Hey everyone, although i think i have started to write to infrequently to really hold any kind of audience.

well i am feeling much better now...the shrimp farm was quite the challenge to my sense of direction. now i have just committed to a month of working on santa martha animal relief centre in the amazon.

right now i am on my weekend break from there having just finished my first week.

here´s how the week went:

day 1: because i was feeling overconfident i didn´t pay very close attention to the directions on the website and so was pretty sure i wasn´t going to find the place in the middle of the jungle. however, luck was on my side and i managed to get off the bus in the right place. a woman greeted my waving her arms from the top of some steps with a small boy clinging to her leg. i have since learned that she is marcia, the mother of ¨the family¨with whom santa martha has a land agreement with. they are a great bunch of about 15 people who are invaluable to the way the centre runs. she told me that gloudina (the girl who runs the centre) was arriba, so i headed up the stairs. gloudina set me up in my room and asked if i didn´t mind if she didn´t show me around right away but instead if we could just continue building a house for the ocelots. nothing would have made me happier than to have a hammer in my hand and to actually be getting some work done. the other volunteers reconvened at lunch around: glen and nico are from england and have been at the centre for almost five months. andrea was from italy and was my roommate. natasha is from the states and is very opinionated, andy is from england as well and likes trance dance music and katia is from germany and started the same day as me.

that afternoon gloudina, who is from south africa and is 22, showed katia and i around the centre. there are about 15 monkeys total, a gazillion different kinds of parrots, 2 ocelots, 2 caymans (large crocodile things), 2 kinkachus (i have no idea how to spell these things, just to say them...you figure it out), 20 snapping turtles, 6 tortoises and about 6 wild boar pig things (i can´t remember their name). the rest of our afternoon was spent trying to catch an escaped macaw parrot, but we didn´t, and then we had to try to find the escaped caymans. they were located but clearly couldnt just be grabbed and put back in their pond, so plans for traps were concocted. that evening we headed in el triumfo, a small town about twenty bus minutes down the road so that the boys could play a soccer game against the locals. everyone got really worked up and it was fun to watch.

day 2: feeding and cleaning starts at 8 and lasts for about 2 hours. today we just learned about how the procedures worked and started to introduce ourselves to some of the animals (the we is katia and i, as we are both newbies). after a break we headed out with gloudina as a local man showed her around his land with the hope that she would help him write a proposal for a tourist centre he wants to start on his land. the walking is hard work through thick jungle but soooo beautiful. it was hard to see the vision that this man had and easy to understand why he wants to do it. he sees people in places like banos making a killing of jungle tours and thinks that it is a way to quick cash, but in reality it is much much harder and most tourists want something very different than pristine wild jungle on their jungle tour. that afternoon natasha and i spent fixing up the woolly monkey cage putting up new play things. tonight nico and andy tried to make a traditional british roast but used chicken instead and tried to make yorkshire pudding with pancake mix. they were´t aware that the chickens come with the guts and feet and head still attached and so just put them into the oven. needless to say it was pretty hilarious when somone tried to carve it and the feet fell out of the butt.

day 3: today as we were feeding the capuchin monkey cage we were attacked by the bigger female monkey. it was really scary and katia was bitten very badly on her hand. i just got bitten in two places around my findernail but the petrol company´s mobile ambulance was called to come and stitch up katia´s hand. we were both pretty shaken up by it and katia can´t use her hand but generally we are fine. we don´t know why they decided to attack but gloudina´s guess is that we are unknown and tina (the female monkey) has recently taken on a bit of a protector role within her cage. the petrol company wanted us to get rabies shots, even though we know that the monkeys have had their shots and do not have rabies so we were driven to the nearest hospital an hour and a half away. however, they didn´t have the vaccine anyway so we were just driven back. pointless. the traps for the caymans were finished today and live chicks were put inside to try and lure them in, but we will have to see if they work.

day4: after feeding and cleaning we headed to the dam that provides us our water to fix it using cement as crabs had started to eat into the clay bags holding up the structure. it involved carrying 50kg bags of cement up steep muddy hills and then carrying double the amount of sand and then mixing and cementing the dam. not easy work but it feels really good to be working hard and sweating especially after all the inactivity as a result of the broken foot. afternoon was spent fixing up a bird cage to make the holes small enough to prevent escapees. the big woolly monkey escaped today so gloudina spent a lot of time trying to get him back in but with no luck.

day 5: after feeding and cleaning we built a trap for the woolly but eventually he managed to catch him somewhere else so we just ended up taking the trap down. later, andy and i built a new shelter for the pig things. they could bite through bone though so we were fairly careful about how we went about it. the afternoon we were sent to clean out the ocelot cage as they had been given a live chicken a few days earlier and so the cage was sooo smelly.

day 6: saturday morning we just feed and clean before going on weekend break but i was down at the monkey cage and again and they attacked. a monkey got out because i couldnt hold the door shut i was so scared but niko managed to convince it back into the cage. i will have to spend some time with the monkeys i think apart from feeding and cleaning to get them to know me better because i think they are just spooked of me right now. i will go and sit with my book and a banana outside their cage for an hour everyday to calm them down about my presence.

generally it was a great week and i have decided to stick it out here for a month to really get into it and be of some use. this week will just be spent getting better at the routines etc. and becoming more comfortable with the animals.