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