Working days

The seahorse research consists of getting to know the substrates the seahorses live on, like sponges, sea urchins, hydrozoans and sea pens. Since sea horses are only a couple of cm, you have to look well to see one. Because of the fishing activities, the number of seahorses have greatly diminished and so far we have not even seen one. Others have, so it's just a question of continuing and being lucky.

Six years ago you would see several sea horses during one survey, now we see 1 sea horse on every 2-3 surveys. The survey consists of a transect in the water of 50 m. With a group of 5 people you put two ropes of 50 in the water and 2 people zigzag along one rope looking for seahorses and substrates, 2 people zigzag a transect along the second rope and the fifth person reels in the rope again.

In a morning or afternoon we do transects on 2 different locations. The other part of the day you can join in on some land based activities. These activities are mostly beach cleanings. In Sihanoukville and the surrounding islands the sewers lead directly into the sea (you can even see the sand getting dark brown in some spots of all the nutrients of the excrements) and garbage is thrown everywhere on the ground and in the see. That means that, depending on the wind, the coast can be full with plastic, rope, bottles, etc. Other activities include a snorkel survey were we look for invertebrates and snorkeling to clean garbage in the sea like fishing nets which are attached to rocks or coral.

As ecologists we do have some issues concerning the land based activities. We are only cleaning other peoples garbage, which is fine, but unfortunately the organisation we work for does not do anything to protect the reef or take preventive measures against the garbage thrown everywhere, also because the municipality and the people are not very cooperative. Because the project might move to another place in a couple of months (where the municipality is making an effort to be a clean city), we are a bit reluctant to set up our own activities because they will probably not carried out for long. Dolf is going to try to build a weather station which will measure wind direction, and force, temperature, air pressure and humidity. We have bought some equipment and downloaded some articles to start building.

The village has 1 small school, but 3 Dutch teachers just arrived and are going to teach the school children and teachers for 1 year, so Annelies still has to see if she can do something with environmental education. Khmer is a difficult language to learn so that will be a challenge. At the moment we have 1 Cambodian general manager who speaks English and 1 English manager who speaks Khmer, so communication is sometimes interesting.

On Friday you can choose to go to the mainland or to Koh Rong. If you stay on the island, you do a fun dive in the afternoon, while the others take the bout to their destinations. The visibility is not really great and because of the overfishing there are not always much fish swimming around. The interesting part of this is that you look at the smaller things you normally overlook, like invertebrates and nudibranches.

The Cambodians are very friendly people, but because we are with so many volunteers and do not speak Khmer, we mostly hang out with the volunteers. The temperature is increasing and each day is over 30 degrees, rising to 40 in April. Because we live next to the see, we almost always have a cool breeze. That means we will probably adjust our travel plans and make some short trips in extended weekends. Cambodia is not a really big country which makes it relatively easy to travel around. There are more than enough busses to each destination. Visiting Angkor Wat in over 40 degrees might not be a good idea. We will probably spend Christmas on the island, since everybody is travelling at that time.

Living on Koh Rong Samlem

Finally a message from us. The internet connection is not good enough to post blogs.  Last weekend we were on neighbouring island Koh Rong,  but the internet connection of the whole island was off.
We have had a good time up to now.  Dolf is in training to become a dive master and Annelies has joined the survey team to investigate seahorses and their habitat. The first week the weather was sometimes too bad for diving, with high waves, wind and choppy water but it has definitely improved by now. The climate change is noticed here as well, because from November onwards the sea is supposed to be flat.
We live in very basic conditions. We share a small two room bungalow with four people in bunk beds. The second room is our shower which consists of a big ton of cold water. The living room is under a big roof with big tarps as walls.  They are usually open to let the breeze in.We will add some pictures in our next blog to give you a better idea.
We live together with a group of volunteers that varies in size. We started with 30 and are now down to 20.
Some volunteers stay two weeks, while others stay for several months. Most are European but there are also people from the states, Canada and Australia. The food is actually pretty good, but is of course always accompanied with rice. On the mainland you can buy lots of different fruits and there are many western restaurants. In sihanoukville you can find food from every European country because a lot of Western people started their own restaurant. We just bought a kilo of rambutans, comparable with lychee. Dragonflies are also really good. Search for a picture on the internet, both inside and outside, because they look pretty weird.

We live next to a small village of fisherman. Unfortunately, bigger trawlers from Thailand and Vietnam have largely depleted the local fish population, which means we are mainly measuring the recovery of the reef. The local kids catch squid using lines from their small foam boats and the village fishermen have only long boats. There is a 300m sustainable fishing zone around the island but unfortunately the patrol team is undermanned and paid extra by the big companies to close their eyes when a trawler comes along. However, the marine life is still abundant and interesting to discover. Tomorrow we will post a blog which describes our work more in detail.

We're in Cambodia

We've arrived in Cambodia after an exhausting flight. Since we were travelling forward in time during the night, the night was really very short and since the plane from Amsterdam to Bangkok was full, sleeping was hard. Quite a contrast with the plane from Sao Paulo to Amsterdam a day and a half earlier. There we could take three seats per person so sleeping was a lot more comfortable. I guess sometimes your lucky and sometimes you aren't.
It  was also great to see a few people during our stopover (quite a few more then we expected, a nice surprise), and I am also happy and proud my grandparents made the train trip back and forth to schiphol (at about 85 years old) , although my grandma did not escape from the escalator unscathed. I don't think (hope) it will be anything longlasting though.
And Auke with his plans! Great! A lot of happiness to you and Joli!

But  after this exhausting flight which went very smooth, we arrived in Phnom Penh. We did not know what to expect. Chaos, dirt, beautiful temples, great food? Many "Happy endings"?
Well it turns out to be a little of all of that. But the sentiment that is most prominent is one of utter happiness after the absolutely delicious meal we had! Man, that was good! But we must say, the Thai restaurant in Wageningen also really does a very good job.

Phnom Penh is certainly a traffic chaos with the tuk-tuks (we finally rode them!) and cars and pedestrians. But it is a rather pleasant  chaos. The atmosphere is very friendly with enormous amounts of restaurants from really modern European style clubs on rooftops to small Street side food stalls full with people. Many of the buildings are old and not too well maintained but there are still a lot of old style colonial buildings lining the road that give it a nice atmosphere. All in all a city worth spending some time in, which  we aren't going to do, since we already booked our bus ticket for tomorrow morning to sihanoukville.
But all in all we are really rather happy, especially since we can go to sleep now.

Getting ready for Cambodia

Huh, Cambodia? People who knew our trip planning will be a bit surprised. We have changed the plans and go to Cambodia instead of Vietnam. Instead of research in the rainforest we will be doing biological research under water and we will spend 4 months diving in Cambodia. For those of you who would like to know more of the project, have a look at www.marineconservationcambodia.org. In the end, we decided that this project would probably be more interesting.

We had a great time in Madidi national park and made indeed some nice pictures. Unfortunately, we didn’t bring the camera during our night walk, so we have no pictures of the different frogs we encountered. We saw a lot of birds, a howler monkey with young clung to her back and various insects, frogs and lizards. We visited a cliff one early morning with a beautiful view over the rainforest, and more important, a good view on the aras and loros who were nestling in holes in the cliff and sitting on tree branches. We have taken some incredibly good pictures and enjoyed every minute watching them with our binoculars. Sometimes they were getting so close that the binoculars were not even necessary. We had visited the same cliff in 2002, so we knew we would like to return here.

Last night we had a nice bbq with live music with the people of San Miguel, to celebrate that they won a football tournament between different indigenous villages the days before. Some of the guys played actually really well, considering the fact that the field wasn’t level and had quite some holes and the grass was only partially grass with little plants which makes it difficult for the ball to roll. Each time San Miguel scored, a fire cracker was lit. The tournament was in another village across the river from San Miguel, so even the people who were not watching could hear when San Miguel scored a goal. After the tournament the village looked liked the Heineken music hall after a concert, waste lying everywhere on the ground.
At the end of the bbq we saw some big lights coming down. It turned out that some people wanted to get their kayak out of the river, but their cars got stuck in the mud. It took a digger quite some time to get the 3 cars out of the mud, because the rope to which the car was attached broke several times. That was an interesting process to watch. Even the army came by to help.

Now it’s time to pack and finish the final things. We will spend a few days in La Paz, which will help to survive the temperature during our stopover in Holland, since the temperature drops down to 4 degrees during the night, while in Rurre we sleep most of the time with the ventilator on during the night.

Dolf with a spider monkey at biological station Jaguarette

This is a 'tejon' in Spanish

In Madidi the trees were a lot bigger compafred to San Miguel

San Miguel players in action during  football tournament

Best friends

  

Showering with water overflowing the roofs in Rurre during heavy downpour

Finishing up

Well, it seems that the story about difficulties with booking tickets isn’t over yet. After booking a new ticket on the phone with KLM, we thought everything was settled. We kept an eye on our credit card and found out that the money was still not taken of our credit card. Time for another phone call (of 8 euros). It seemed that KLM had made a mistake, the ticket was booked but they had forgotten to put the order to Visa. After booking a third ticket we can finally fly with KLM without any trouble. We also wanted to book our ticket from La Paz to Sao Paulo. That didn’t work either. We got a reply that everything was ok, followed by a sign that something went wrong. After three times booking a ticket this way, we received a mail from Visa that they had blocked our account. After calling them we found out that they blocked our card because the transaction was suspicious. Supposedly you cannot book a ticket in Bolivia on a Bolivian website. After noting that we would probably book some more obscure tickets we could use our credit card again. Why is it so difficult to book an e-ticket?

We would have been in the rainforest today, but after 4 days of sunshine it rained again all morning, so there were no boats leaving today. We will try to leave again tomorrow morning. Unfortunately we have planned a meeting on Saturday, so we have to shorten our holiday. We hope to be proper biologists for at least 3 days. We bring our binoculars, bird guide and borrowed plant guide with us and will be out in nature all day. After this trip, we will probably have some nice pictures to post.

We more or less finished the project for now. Last week we had an evaluation meeting with directors and teachers of the different schools. They were enthusiastic but we have to adjust several things. We were glad to notice that most of the people weren’t shy to give comments about negative points as well. The students were really enthusiastic. Each time they see us in or out school they wave and call, so we’re quite popular at the moment it seems. 
We have already made some plans for next year. We adjust our practical and add some theoretical classes about ecology. We hope to include workshops given by local people about topics like agro forestry and sustainable tourism. If we have enough time we will develop some lessons about waste as well for the lower classes. Unfortunately, most people have the habit to throw just everything on the ground and schools would like to change this as well. And then we have to develop a training for the guides and a training for the teachers. The amount of plans is no problem, to put everything in 2 months will be.

Practicals are almost done

At the moment 3 of the 4 schools have done their practical field day. Up to now, almost everything went well and we think it was a great success. The morning started with an introduction and a 2 1/2 hour walk trough the forest with explanation about primary and secondary rainforest, medicinal plants and nice facts about the plants and animals that live there. After lunch, the students designed a poster of a medicinal plant in small groups. The posters will be presented at the schools in an exhibition and the parents are invited as well.
It didn’t start good though. The first school decided not to show up. We were in San Miguel waiting for the boats and were a  bit surprised when there were no students in the boat. It turned out that it had rained all night in Rurre and some families didn’t want their children to go on a boat trip because of the rain. Unfortunately, they only mentioned this the morning the students were going. Everything was ready, but no children… For a moment we thought this would be the end of the project, because it’s fairly hard to predict a week before the date of the practical if it will rain on that day, but the guides, boats and food have to be arranged and cannot be canceled. We visited the director of the school and she assured us that she would talk with the parents. Good start of our first day. We immediately talked with the directors of the other schools and they said the weather would not pose a problem. Phew, we were happy to hear that.
With the other 3 schools everything went fine. It was nice to see that each individual guide had a slightly different approach and different information to explain to the students. Some are natural teachers, while other guides have a lot of information to tell to the students.
Students are a bit more timid compared to Dutch students and do not ask a lot of questions, but they enjoyed the day and worked hard. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they work fast, but everything goes at a slower pace in this country. The end result of the posters were quite nice. Each group of students was supposed to pick a medicinal plant which they found interesting and design a poster with a drawing of the plant, some morphological characteristics (form of the leave, structure of the veins etc.) and the medicinal use. We added some information from different plant books, including the scientific name and sometimes pictures and additional information.
Some students can draw really well, but we found out that they are very dependant on the teachers and need a lot of help (also because they just don’t read what they need to do and I think that is a universal bad habit of students). 
The San Miguel students were a lot younger, because they only have the first two classes of the secondary school and we designed the practical for the 5th grade. We noticed the difference, because at one point almost all the teachers of San Miguel were working on the posters of the students and the students were watching. After kindly reminding them that these were the student’s posters, the students went back to work. Apparently a good final result is more important than the fact that it this the student’s work. That’s a big difference compared to the Dutch school system. These students did however have a lot of knowledge of medicinal plants, because they live near the forest. Even the pouring rain didn’t diminish their enthusiasm. We did change the contents though. Poster in the morning, walk in the afternoon. You can only do so much when it’s raining really hard. At the end of the afternoon Annelies went back to Rurre (Dolf was still in Rurre to arrange a meeting with the schools). The water level of the river had risen considerably and whole trees were floating in the water, which made it an interesting boat trip back. It wasn’t really dangerous because they know what they are doing but we had somebody in front shoving big logs away from the boat and giving directions. By now the water level is normal, because the sun is shining really good and it is very hot. That makes the ice cream sellers happy and gives us a good excuse to buy an ice cream every now and then.
The practical gave us a good insight in the Bolivian educational system. Tomorrow the final school will go. We have visited them three days in a row to make sure they wouldn’t cancel. After that it is time for evaluation and writing our final report.
Yesterday we booked a ticket for our next trip. It seems impossible for us to book a ticket online in a correct way. We booked the ticket to Vietnam, but received a reply a day later that something went wrong with the payment. The good part of this story is that we were informed this time that it went wrong. The difficult part was that it costs us almost 15 euros of telephone costs to call Visa, the Brazilian office (we fly from Sao Paolo) and eventually the Dutch KLM office. It turned out that the authorization code of our Visa had disappeared somewhere along the line between sending the information from NL to Brazil by KLM so we had to book a new ticket on the phone (with additional charging of course, but they were small). But hey, we have a flight to Vietnam, and it is not even that expensive, considering the late time of booking and the fact that we fly to the other side of the world! We will be in Vietnam from Nov 26- Apr 13, although the last 5 weeks we are probably traveling around and diving in various countries. What a bad life we have!

New pictures online

Hey all, we have some new pictures online. Some I put below, the rest you can see on https://plus.google.com/photos/115837808651205760395/albums/5926179484845030881?authkey=COP4--XmwdjV_wE

The first few are from a trip walking up to a viewpoint just outside Rurrenabaque. It is a small hill just outside with a big cross on it, and a viewpoint. Another viewpoint is on the next peak just below it. It really gives nice views. A lot of the locals go up there on their saturday afternoon, and so did we.

The pictures after that are from San Miguel del Bala when we went there to prepare the field practical that we have been organizing for the kids of the local schools. We really enjoy having the option of choosing between Rurrenabaque and San Miguel. One having all the facilities and food and stuff you would want, the other being very quiet, calm, relaxed and with beautiful nature right outside your front door. Not a bad life at all. 

We also have pictures in our webalbum from the first three field practicals, but I did not put them down here just yet, because Annelies is writing a blogpost about that at the moment, and will put some pictures in that post. Have fun looking at them.

our hotel (the blue one) as seen from the viewpoint

It was just a baby. Not that big at all :)

Busy, busy, busy

If you look at the amount of work we’re doing at the moment, it looks like we’re back in Holland. We are really busy to get everything organized. Only difference is that when we decide to take a day off, it’s not going to happen. We were looking forward last week to our visit to a biological field station, but it turned out the road was closed. We should have known, because the evening before the rain was pouring like crazy. We forgot to bring our jackets and after about 20 minutes the gutter of the restaurant overflowed at several places. That’s all very normal, you just move your chair and go sit someplace where it is dry.Which brings me to another nice anecdote.
In our hotel they have just constructed a nice palm leave roof over the patio with hammocks, tables and chairs underneath. They have put in some pipes for drainage and a gutter, but they forget to put a canal in the concrete to the drain, which means that every time it is raining hard the whole patio overflows. The water sometimes even runs into the hallway of the hotel. When they were constructing the whole thing we already had some doubts when we looked at the builders who had already difficulties hammering nails straight into the wood. Our doubts were confirmed last week when visitors from San Miguel said that the roof was put together really bad. But we don’t complain, we live in the second floor so we don’t have water running into our room and when it is not raining we can read a book while lying in a hammock. 

Back to what we’re doing at the moment. Last week we trained the guides of San Miguel. We explained the practical work, tested their biological knowledge and gave them some tips and tricks how to cope with students. It went fairly well. Of course we started an hour later as planned and we did not manage to tell them all the information we wanted to, but it was a good day. Part of the guides guides have had an extensive 3 month field course taught by Conservation International in which they worked together with a herpetologist, zoologist and entomologist, which means that they know a lot about ecology.
At the moment we have our final preparations for our field practicum which is from Wednesday-Friday and Monday next week.  We also planned a first meeting with a work group. We thought it would be good to set up a work group with teachers from every school, guides from San Miguel and some other people to prepare a field course for next year. A work group turned out to be a whole new concept for the Bolivian participants, but several people agreed to come. We were expecting to be with 5-12 people but ended up with 3. The teachers forgot to mention that they had a meeting about examination regulations, because when asked earlier the time and date were fine. Too bad, no meeting. Next option at the end beginning of November. Apparently it is very common to forget appointments and people need to be remembered several times. We hope to meet 1 or 2 times with the group before we leave for Vietnam.
Next message will take a while since we will be in San Miguel for several days.

Quite some more pictures online

We have uploaded quite a lot of pictures again. You can see them all on https://plus.google.com/photos/115837808651205760395/albums/5926179484845030881?authkey=COP4--XmwdjV_wE.

Here are a few nice ones already:

Why don't you park it there.

View of Rurrenabaque from the other side of the river (San Buenaventura)

Our office (or balcony of our hotel room)

Those cicadas make a hell of a noise! 

Nice moth!

This drunk guy kept insisting on danceing with Annelies and an english tourist.

The music continued the next morning in San Miguel del Bala

And of course Dolf needed to dance as well.

Quite but shy kids posing for our camera at San Miguel del Bala party.

At the end of the party people make resolutions for the next year, and ask the blessing of San Miguel.

Nice little toad (I think) in the forest.

Getting used to living in Rurre

Well, we’re here for 4 weeks already and we are getting used to everything. No more illness, we have find out where you can eat nice dishes, ranging from chicken tandoori in one place to gnocchi with nice roquefort or tomato sauce at another place. We have also learned that we can better not order a lasagna and when you are at the market and you ask if the bread is freshly baked and they say yes, that you can still get a bread which has the structure of concrete. Fortunately we have solved that particular little problem because we have discovered a very good bakery from a French guy. He makes delicious croissants, fresh small breads with apple, cheese or sesame seeds on it. It is freshly baked and you can smell the bread on the street already. That means that the bread is of such a good quality that we turn to our old Dutch habits again; eating bread twice a day instead of the Bolivian way of eating two or three warm meals a day.
The juices are delicious and very cheap. For 0,80-1,40 euro we can sit at a market stall and drink half a liter each of orange/ banana/ papaya/ kiwi or other fruit of the season with milk.

We have also found out which laundry shop not to use. Although the clothes smelled nicer when visiting laundry shop Garfield, Dolf’s t-shirts have become noticeably smaller and his linen belt we forgot to remove from his pant turned out 5 cm too short during the next use (and no he did not gain weight). Our laundry shop is called Number 1 (nice names).

We discovered that when people tell you the boat leaves at 8.30h, you actually have to be there at 7.45h, because you could otherwise miss the boat. It is also possible that the boat will leave 9.45h, but you have to take that for granted.

We have met the elder American men you seem to have in every village in South America who just live here of their American pension. This particular guy sells banana bread on the road side and is very friendly. In Honduras we met similar Americans, who for instance married a local wife and run a bed and breakfast and produced his own beer, or just blow all day while using the internet with a satellite dish on your roof.

Football is very important here. Most bars and restaurants have the tv on, and often football is on. In San Miguel we saw a boy walking around with an Ajax shirt of Charisteas (second hand clothes are very popular as well I guess).We even saw PSV playing. But the Spanish competition is of course most popular. Sometimes you get distracted when a goal is scored as most people know who have listened to Spanish comments, because they react quiet enthusiastic with gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooal for sometimes over 30 seconds. Second best is the Argentinian soap series which look and sound horrible (but so does every soap series in a different language) and third best The Simpsons and the smurfs in Spanish for the kids.

Most traffic occurs by motorbike. Most cars look a bit dilapidated, but the motorbikes are very enthusiastic drivers. Fortunately they don’t drive very fast. Some even turn of the engine when do go downhill a bit (cars tend to do the same). Some have no lights which makes it a bit dangerous at night sine most of the traffic light contains of soft lamps (spaarlampen in Dutch). They like to honk a lot, some of them have removed part of their exhaust to make it sound really nice, while others use their throttle so often they are hard to miss when driving by. But we have also found a solution for that during hot nights: keep the ventilator on. The ventilator makes so much noise that it draws out the surrounding noise. It helps that it is a continuous noise as well, so we haven’t used our earplugs very often.

Each morning when we go to the market or to the bakery (or anyplace actually) we pass the local butcher. Every day she hacks a complete cow into small pieces. There are one or more dogs waiting at the entrance, hoping to get a small piece. Since we don't have a kitchen we have never bought anything, but we always get a nice view on what she is doing when we walk by. Usually in the beginning of the evening, the head of the cow is lying on the pavement. Always good for your appetite if you pass it on your way to dinner.

Next blog I will make some pictures and comments of some peculiarities you see in this city.

Party in San Miguel

We were invited to join the part of the community of San Miguel del Bala, to celebrate the birthday of their saint San Miguel. The party lasted for 4 days, but we only joined them the last 2 days. We missed the two days of football, although we did help the schoolkids preparing the field earlier in the week. It includes a machete and a lot of hacking. They do not have paint to mark the lines of the field, but hack a straight line with a machete to cut the grass which also makes a good line. Instead of a white line, you see a brown line of earth. The teachers were measuring out the field with some ropes and the children (including the 5 year old ones) brought heir machete over to help which lasted the whole morning, so no classes.

Together with two English tourists we were joined the party after dinner. The party was quite nice, with both local music and ‘normal’ music. They have the habit here if they listen to music to get as much speakers (and as big) as possible put them on the maximum sound. The local music was played with a snare drum, a big drum and a flute made of a small pvc pipe. It’s amazing what good tones you can get out of a pvc pipe with holes in it. The locals wanted Dolf to try as well, but the sounds he produced on the flute were of different quality. Several times we were asked to dance with people, varying from very drunk gentlemen to grandmothers and people in a more sober state. 
Next to normal beer they had chicha (locally produced beer made from maize and well known by people who have visited Latin America before) from a bucket, beer made from sugar cane and almost pure (100%) alcohol (which specifically listed on the label that the the alcohol could be used for drinking). And of course big bags of coca leaves you have to chew so you can dance all night. Not very different from a Dutch party, if you swap the coca for energy drinks and pills, you have different brands of beers and strong alcohol like whiskey.

The final day of the party the location of dancing was changed from the communal area to the sandy square in front of the church. The saint was carried out at one point and people all kneeled and kissed the statue and made a promise which was written down in a a notebook. After that, the kids lined up and started dancing together hand in hand in an inner circle. The adults joined in the outer circle. At one point a big plastic bathtub full of candies was thrown on the ground during the dancing. Of course the kids scrawled all over the place to get as much candy as possible. The candies have to touch the ground and are a gift to Pachamama (Mother Earth), who gives it back to you as you pick it up from the ground. Nice intermixing of old and catholic faith.

At the moment we are back in Rurre and are struggling a bit with deciding how to progress with developing our educational material. We would like to work together with both guides and teachers to design a good educational program, but it is not so easy to get all the parties together. The people from San Miguel have no cell phone coverage and there are only 1-2 boats per day to San Miguel, which makes it a bit difficult to communicate and make appointments. The teachers all have a double job (since teaching at a school is only half a day of work). Of course we would like to design educational material which all parties will be using after we are gone, but designing a practicum, theoretical classes and train both teachers and guides, all in cooperation with locals is a bit too much work in two months. We already decided to postpone the teacher training and theoretical classes to the next period (April/ May 2014) and to make the practical a bit easier than we originally planned. It is still a challenge to design a practical which will make 4 schools enthusiastic and a lot of logistics is included as well, so Dolf has decided to appoint himself as coordinator. Preferably a local has the coordination role, but at the moment they are too busy with their normal work. This means a lot of running back and forth to the different organisations to make appointments and redesign proposals. Annelies is more focussing on the content of the educational material. We have made a good division of tasks this way and hope we will able to produce some useful educational materials which are of good quality.

We have made some nice pictures again in San Miguel an will upload these asap.

Pictures online

Just a short message before going to San Miguel del Bala. We are getting our foto's online. It took a little work to find a proper Internet connection, but using my cellphone as a modem and wifi access point, and using the 3G Internet connection, Internet is at least working reasonably (for those interested, only 800kbps downstream and 250kbps upstream).
You can find our pictures on
Google plus/Picasa Web.

Another trip that didn’t happen

But not as serious this time :). We were planning to go to San Miguel del Bala again, to have a proper talk with the guides and teachers there. But when we showed up for the boat about 20 minutes before the first one would normally be leaving (we were told), we just saw one pulling away. But no worries, in an hour and a half another one would go, a captain ensured us. But after waiting an hour or 2.5, the captain told us nobody wanted to go anymore, and therefore now boat would go. Ok, sure, change of plans….
We decided to spend time going to the different directors of the different schools in Rurrenabaque. And that was a good choice. They are all very accessible, and enthousiastic about the project. Schools here often contain both primary and secondary schools in one. Schools last from 7:30 to 12:30, but some schools share the building with another school, which uses the building in the afternoon and early evening, or they have double shifts, where for each grade there is a morning class, and a second (parallel) afternoon class. So they have double classes for each grade, and kids are either always in the morning shift  or always in the afternoon shift. Only one school of the four has proper books (which we are looking at to get an idea of their level), which are Bolivian, and they were able to buy them through some aid program. On the rest of the schools, the teacher dictates everything and the kids write it down. One school has an impressive collection of educational dvd’s of varying quality, and to our pleasant surprise, there were quite a lot of bbc/david attenborough movies in there, dubbed in spanish, and some other nice movies as well.
We are probably going to develop the course for the fith grade of secondary school (the class before graduation class, about the same age as 5VWO in NL). They will go on a field trip to the lodge at San Miguel del Bala, just outside the Madidi national park, where there is quite a lot of secondary (disturbed/previously cut) forest, a bit of older forest, nice trails to a cañon and a trail for medicinal plants. We hope they can also go to the second lodge (Caquiwara) which is inside the national park and surrounded by primary rainforest (undisturbed, with the giant trees, you get the picture). The trip will be preceded by a class (or two) to give them more ecological knowledge of the rainforest, and they will probably have to do an assignment in the field, which they will finish afterwards at school, like creating a poster or such, which they can present in an exhibition to their parents.
Our work will be mostly training the teachers and the guides so they themselves can teach the course, also in the future. The talks with the schools are now at the point where we need to discuss the amount of students that can go, given the amount of money available for the excursion.
Because of the talks, our spaninsh (especially Annelies’) is improving nicely. Next week we’ll sit at the back of some classes to observe their teaching system, and we will probably have a meating with the teachers of one school to introduce the project and ask them for input.
Health wise things are still a bit shaky. I am fine again for the last two days, but now Annelies is ill. Yesterday she had a high fever and a heavy cold. Today the fever seems to be gone though, although she still doesn’t feel well. Lot’s of rest, water, steaming a bit, and when she had a fever, paracetamol and a cold shower, seem to have worked.

Op visite in San Miguel/ Visiting San Miguel

We add a summary in English and continue this part in Dutch.
After a few days we are back in Rurre again. Unfortunately with a nice collection of mosquito and ant bites and Dolf fell ill a bit (diarrhea and stomach cramps).We have visited San Miguel del Bala the las few days, a small indigenous village in the rainforest where the Tacana live. We have been introduced to the people of the village. We hoped to speak to the teachers and guides as well but it was weekend, which meant they were off. So we enjoyed our free time with some nice walks and encountered squirrels, butterflies and a lot of insects (including a big cockroach in our sleeping room). Unfortunately no monkeys, because people have hunted them too much. We also had time to lay in a hammock with view of the river while reading our book. We have probably planned way too much in the short time we have, but we’ll see. San Miguel is a small village with wooden houses and palm leave roofs. 36 families of Tacana live here and they have a small school with 50 children. The secondary school consists only of 10 kids and they have 3 teachers in total. They have to be able to give all the courses which was why they immediately askes us if we could help them out with English classes.
For now we have designed a plan which consists of an introduction lesson, followed by an excursion in the rain forest by the guides, followed by the children designing a poster and give a presentation (at 4 different schools). But first we need to talk with teachers, which will hopefully be this week.

Zo, we zijn weer in Rurre. Niet geheel zonder ongemakken. Dolf is een beetje ziek (spierpijn, diarree, buikkrampen) en Annelies zit onder de muggen/ mieren/ bedwants beten op de meest vreemde plekken (ik ben er nog niet uit welk beest het was). De muggen hebben op Dolf z’n enkel boter, kaas en eieren gespeeld want hij heeft een stuk of 10 bulten daar. Maar verder gaat het prima. De gewone ongemakken als je net bent aangekomen in een tropenland. Net als de 4 kilo was die we in 5 dagen al bij elkaar gezweet hebben.
Inmiddels hebben we de belangrijkste mensen in San Miguel del Bala ontmoet en zijn we officieel voorgesteld aan de community. Dat gaat altijd anders dan je denkt. Wij hadden een heel verhaal voorbereid voor de dorpsvergadering, maar het bleek dat het districtshoofd langs was gekomen voor een noodveragadering. Helaas, wij werden weggestuurd en mochten in het klaslokaal wachten. Daarna werd nog wel uitgelegd wat we kwamen doen, maar eigenlijk was het nationale schoonmaakdag ter voorbereiding voor het feest ter ere van San Miguel op 29 september.
Het complete voetbalveld en het gras er omheen moest gemaaid worden met machetes en bosmaaiers. Dolf heeft zich lekker uitgeleefd met de bosmaaier en Annelies heeft het voetbalveld van snoeppapiertjes ontdaan. Dat is best warm in de volle zon bij zo’n 30 graden. Daarna waren we nog onderdeel van de (zeer interessante) onofficiele dorpsvergadering waar nog flink wat mensen vermanend werden toegesproken en een tweede schoonmaakdg werd afgesproken, want de helft was niet op komen dagen eerder die dag. De beloning was een mooi boottochtje bij zonsondergang terug naar Rurre.

San Miguel is een dorp waar 36 families van de Tacana stam leven. Ze wonen in houten huisjes met palmen daken en leven o.a van het toerisme. Niet iedereen is daar even blij mee, want door het toerisme hebben ze hun eigen landbouw verwaarloosd en kopen ze nu de meeste groenten in Rurre. Ze hebben een lodge voor toeristen: een aantal mooie maar simpele bamboe/ stenen huisjes en twee gemeenschappelijke ruimtes die uitkijken op de rivier. Wij kunen slapen in een grote hut die gemaakt is voor vrijilligers. Er hangen ook een aantal hangmatten, dus het is fijn een boekje lezen in de hangmat met uitzicht (de gemeenschappelijke ruimtes hebben bijna geen muren maar alleen horrengaas). De afgelopen vier dagen hebben we daar gewandeld, gerelaxed en het dorp bezocht. De community zelf ligt op 15 minuten lopen van de lodge.
Tijdens onze wandeling hebben we al een paar leuke vogels gezien, veel vlinders en andere insecten (waaronder een grote kakkerlak in onze slaapkamer) en grote eekhoorns. De apen zijn er helaas niet, daar is te zwaar op bejaagd…

De school is vrij klein: drie leraren en 50 kinderen, waarvan er 10 op de middelbare school zitten. Na de 3e klas moeten de leerlingen naar school in Rurre. De docenten geven dan ook alle vakken, een leuke uitdaging! We werden gelijk gestrikt voor de Engelse les, die we wel kunnen geven als we er toch zijn voor ons project.

Ons schema liep niet helemaal gelijk aan dat van hun. Wij dachten in deze 4 dagen de leraren te kunnen spreken, een bijeenkomst met de gidsen te kunnen beleggen en eventueel nog met een aantal gidsen een wandeling te maken om hun kennisniveau te peilen. Maar in het weekend zijn alle gidsen vrij, vrijdag was daar geen tijd voor en maandag was de schoonmaakdag al ingekort door de extra dorpsvergadering. Helaas, morgen gaan we terug voor een gesprek met de leraren (die zijn er alleen ‘s ochtends) en met de gidsen (zij hebben alleen ‘s avonds tijd).
Wel hebben we inmiddels aardig op de rails staan wat we gaan doen de komende tijd. Of dat allemaal gaat passen binnen hun tijdsschema is natuurlijk nog maar de vraag.

Het voorlopige plan is om een introductieles te verzorgen op de vier deelnemende scholen, de leerlingen mee te nemen op excursie naar het regenwoud olv de gidsen en  in de afsluitende lessen de leerlingen aan een poster te laten werken die ze (hopelijk) voor elkaar en eventueel ouders kunnen presenteren. De docenten trainen we zodat ze de introductieles de volgende keer zelf kunnen verzorgen en de gidsen trainen we in het lesgeven aan kinderen. Binnenkort voegen we ook weer wat foto’s toe, zodat jullie een idee krijgen hoe San Miguel en Rurre eruit zien.

First day in Rurre

Today is our first working day in Rurrenabaque. The Bolivian organisation who is working with the primary schools for Amazon Fund is in Rurre this week and today we joined them for classes. Three classes worked in their school garden and learned how to make compost and how to protect their vegetables from insects and fungi with simple measures including spraying plants with a mixture of soap and water and another mixture of water, onions and garlic. The younger children brought a plastic bottle, which was cut in half, filled with earth and a few seeds. Part of the school square has holes now because the earth was used to fill the bottles but each child can grow his own pepper or onion plant at home now. We had some nice chats, helped them out a bit and made some nice pictures which we can hopefully upload on this page as well, but the internet connection is very very slow.
Tomorrow we will have a chat with Constantino, the contactperson for San Miguel del Bala. The Tacana indians who will guide the school children in the rainforest live there and it is also the location of one of the 4 participating secondary schools in our program. Although we arrived a bit later than planned, we can immediately start working, which is of course a good start of our project.

The view from our hotel

Little girl happy with her kind of twisted radish

Kids working the vegetable garden