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.