The narrative continues…on to Days 2 and 3.
Tuesday, we got to enjoy the entirety of the wonderfully structured day that Rich prepares for the volunteers each day. Breakfast at 7:30. First work assignment 8:30-noon. Lunch at 12:30. Rest/Free time in the heat of the day. Second work assignment 3:30-5:30. Dinner 6:00.
We checked the white board to see our work placements for the day. My morning started with “Moving Sensor Cameras.” Didn’t sound too bad, right? Ha! Up the hill, down the ditch, scramble up the roots, around the wasp nest, avoid the stinging ants, don’t drink all your water at once, back down the 30 foot sheer drop, up the other side. Don’t drop the cameras!!
Isabel, Poppy, and I were on camera duty. We followed Eduardo, the biologist out onto his “trails” in the jungle. I use the word “trail” loosely. Here’s it’s a route, known only to Eduardo that gets hiked by 4 people a couple times a year. We went up and over and down and through too many land contours to count. I clawed my way up what-appeared-to-be walls of roots and dirt and successfully avoided the “bad” wasps. All while carrying a water bottle, giant sensor cameras, and a first aid kit in my hands. I went with the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other approach and promised myself I wouldn’t give up, no matter how exhausted I was. It worked! No whining, just persistence. I was really proud of myself, especially given how physically drained I was. Trekking through the jungle turns out to be a pretty exhausting task. And, lucky for me, it gets you surprisingly dirt. I made it back to the camp wearing my blue-now-brown shirt like a merit badge for a morning’s work well done.
During my free time after lunch, I decided to go for a stroll up the hill from camp a ways. Within just a couple minutes, I started hearing monkey chatter coming from the trees around me. When I started scanning the trees, I found myself completely surrounded by about fifteen Capuchin monkeys (those really adorable white-faced ones). There were moms running around with babies on their backs, monkeys literally swinging from tree to tree, some of them banging hard seed pods on the trees to open them, others digging into their fruits and scooping out the seeds with their little fingers. All of them were eyeing me suspiciously, obviously not thrilled that I was in their space. I reached for my camera, only to realize I’d left it in the first aid bag from the morning. (That was the last time I was caught without my camera for the week.) Instead of worrying about snapping the perfect shot, I got to stand their watching and appreciating all the activity going on around me. Listening to the sound of monkeys chattering to each other is actually wonderfully fascinating. After they’d finally all edged their way away from me, I hurried back to the camp to get my camera and returned to try to hunt down a couple that had disappeared into the trees. And I was lucky enough to even get a couple pictures before being chased off by some very territorial wasps.
My second afternoon session was orientation with Rich. He gave us a rundown of all the projects that are happening at the park and all the work that is being done. Especially with all of the physical labor to be done, it was awesome to see why we were doing the work we were doing. That was something that we never got in Liberia. The Why of what we’re doing. All we ever see is our little pixel of the picture and we never know what we’re working towards. Barra Honda was totally the opposite. We had vision from the get go and ran with it the rest of the time there.
Dinner-time included another sunset walk before heading back to Manuel’s. This time, I tried to learn a bit of Cumbia (but failed miserably) before flopping into bed completely exhausted.
Day 3, our wonderful cook Meicel didn’t show up. And nobody can work without a good breakfast of rice and beans. Oscar, Steph, Eduardo, and I took to the kitchens to try to do what Meicel does single-handedly. Lucky for us, it turned out pretty well and we got off to a good start without any more hang-ups. My work for the morning was the most stereotypical “conservation” project you can come up with (besides saving whales): planting trees! After carrying up baby trees from the nursery garden, we set out to planting trees…in the woods. Strange? Maybe a little. Barra Honda is actually a secondary forest which means that it was a forest, and then not a forest (silly humans), and now it’s a forest again. None of the trees in the park are older than 50 years. It’s pretty impressive how it’s turned out for such a “short” time span. After that, we worked on cleaning up the park’s campground area. Really, it’s only space for a couple of tents, but it still has to be kept tidy, mowed, etc. And we even found a little turtle while we were working. After lunch, I had to break down and do laundry. In 48 hours, I’d managed to “filthify” everything I’d brought for 5 days. They called it a “laundry machine.” I called it a sink with way too many bilingual dials, knobs, and switches. My afternoon work was on mending bat nets. Rich took a couple of us to a giant net that he’d set up in the parking area and showed us how to go about reparing the ultra fine mesh. He pointed to a 2-inch diameter hole and said it’d probably take about an hour to fix. I laughed. Turns out he was right. I actually loved working on the nets. It was incredibly relaxing and obsessive detail work which I tend to be quite good at. Happy Megan.
Third consecutive sunset walk before heading back to the house. We sat around listening to Stefan play some of his awesome guitar compositions and singing along in German. Even though very few of us spoke German, we all had a great time listening to the music. I got a nice nighttime burst of adrenaline when I found a baby scorpion making its way across my bare knee. I had a split moment reconciling my desire to show it to people, take a picture, fling it away, and continue my video of Stefan’s song. What I ended up with was a swinging camera shot, shouting “Look! A scorpion!” and knocking it halfway across the room with the back of my hand. Another excellent day in Barra Honda.