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!