Liesje de boskabouter and the continuation of the fight against the chickens

Unfortunately, the weather is still not as it should supposed be. When it is raining but we still need to go out, we have taken after the local dress. You put on your poncho. Since they are only available in one size, they make Annelies look a a bit like a dwarf, hence the title of the weblog and the picture.

Not an awful lot happened since our last post.

Working with the schools improves a little, we have had another teacher training and some appointments. Besides that, we have been preparing the practicals, visiting different locations and deciding which location would be best for the students. This included some nice walks in the surrounding hills and at the other side of the river. The problem is that there have been a lot of landslides and parts of the path have been been demolished or just disappeared. The hills are sometimes very steep and with the amount of rain it is a lot of slipping and sliding. Nice for us, but not for the students.

On the other side of the river are also walking paths and they are better maintained. We went to have a look by kayak. Nice idea, but it was raining the whole morning, so by the time we crossed the river we were soaking wet. The local people looked at us like we were crazy and I can imagine that, why would you go kayaking in this weather? Even with the rain it was still fun to explore the river and walk through the forest afterward. It is a nice part of rainforest, not primary forest, but with some big trees and the path is less steep. It almost felt we were back in the Netherlands when the owner of the kayaks explained to us that we had to carry the kayaks up the path so that we could lock them with a big chain and lock against a tree. Just like your Dutch bike, if you don't lock it, it is gone by the time you return. Unfortunately no pictures because of the rain.

Dolf got a little help in his fight against the chickens by the way. We have a new ally. One night we heard someone shooting a gun in our garden and it turned out it was the neighbour hunting for an animal that had caught and killed his chicken. Dolf helped him in his search and when they found the opossum, the gun was jammed so he got away. Dolf did not mind this at all of course, because a) he has help in his fight against the chickens and b) we don't like to kill animals. One chicken down, 8 to go. The opossum was sufficiently scared, because until now he has not returned. Too bad for us, we still wake up with the lovely sound of the rooster and his chickens. Our parents have acquainted themselves as well with the noises, since we only Skype at six in the morning because that's the only time the internet connection is good enough and the chickens like to join in in the conversation.

The only drawback was that the smell in our garden and at the end in our house (remember open windows) wasn't too good. It turned out that the opossum had left the chicken and it was decomposing in the yard. After a good rain the smells disappeared which solved our problem of what to do with the remains of the chicken.

Talking about bad smells, Annelies walked through the street the other day and the smell was really bad. In the Netherlands you have the saying 'it smells as bad as a corpse' which she mentioned to Dolf.  We had a look in the gutters to see if something was blocking the water and found indeed a corpse. Of a dead snake.