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.