AmaZOOnico day 37-49 – week 4 in the Jungle

Feb 17 – 23 2011

Week 4 in the jungle

Routine keeps you sane!
After only 4 weeks here in the jungle I have started developing routines, especially when coming to Tena on my day off. It goes something like this:
Arrive in Tena and drop off laundry
Check in at hostel and have a WARM shower
Go have hawaiian pizza and fanta
Go to the little old lady store pick up a bottle of water and choose some sweets from the candy case
Go back to hostel, relax and check internet then sleep

I once tried to alter the route by eating dinner somewhere else and when I returned to AmaZOOnico it just didn’t feel like I had had a proper day off. Routine and friendly faces at regular stops definately keep you sane and grounded. It also let you feel a bit more like a local than a short termer.

Road accident…It had to happen sometime
On my return trip to Puerto Barantilla to pick up the canoe the bus had an accident. Or perhaps it was more like a car hit us as it came screaming round a blind corner on the wrong side of the road. The bus hit it broadside and it slid off the road. Then the screaming match began and finally the driver just jumped in the car and drove off, much to the annoyance of the bus driver who ran down the road after him. Since the only speed limits in South America seems to be FAST and EXTRA FAST, I am surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Even after standing in the road looking befuddled for 20min the bus driver still managed to get me to my stop on time, but am fairly certain he was just going fast this time.

The tail’s tale continues
I have started helping with the cleaning and medicating of Francisco for his tail. It looks ok, but there are concerns of infection and healing correctly, there also appears to be a small piece of bone that is sticking out as the sutures did not hold correctly and the wound is healing with a gap. It takes 4 people to clean the wound as 1 person has to hold the head, 1 person has to hold the feet and hands, 1 person has to hold the tail and the final person cleans and rebandages. The whole time Francisco is screaming, its quite stressful. We have to abrade, reopen scabs, the area every day to make sure that there is no puss or infection and I can only imagine how painful that must be. But it is too dangerous to constantly medicate him to keep him calm, not to mention the lack of adequate medications. On one cleaning I was helping Michael, manager, with cleaning and then he handed me the convenia injection, antibiotic, and told me to give it subcutaneous. I have officially injected cats, dogs, lizards, snakes and now a wooley monkey. Not to bad a list if I say so myself, although a wee bit stressful trying to find a good location on Francisco with 3 pairs of eyes watching my every move.

Cooking duty on a Thursday
Our human food arrives on a friday morning and by Thursday we have VERY limited options which forces people on cooking duty to get creative. Sometimes food is almost finished by wednesday depending on the number of people to feed. On this week Flavio, Kichwa volunteer (Kichwa = people from this region), and I were the designated drivers and there was pretty much nothing left on the shelves. So we did what we could and came up with a hodge podge that actually worked reasonably well:
Rice
Mash potato with lots of butter
Tuna with fried onion and garlic
Coleslaw (cabbage and carrots with mayonaise and raisens)
and finally fruit salad for dessert.

Not too bad considering the limited supplies and that most of the stuff was starting to rot in the humidity.

Enriching the life of Felix the Jaguarundi
One of our weekly tasks is to design an enrichment activity for one of the animals, so that they are challenged and do not become too bored with living in a cage. I have had a number of successful enrichments and so I decided to try something for Felix the jaguarundi. I got permission to use raw eggs and soaked them in as much blood as I could find from the meat for afternoon feeding. The plan was as follows:
Hide the eggs and he would search them out and then play with them and finally figure out how to eat them. Jaguarundi’s have been known to pilfer from birds nests so this seemed like an easy plan.

One factor to note though, is that Felix was raised by humans and does not have much wild instinct. In truth he is not the smartest jaguarundi but we love him anyway.

Turns out the enrichments went a little like this:
Get Felix in smaller cage to lock door and enter main cage.
Hide eggs near fence where I can observe.
Release him, and watch as he searches for his afternoon meat. (due to meat shortage the eggs were his afternoon feeding).
He found the eggs pretty quickly and licked them with enthusiasm, but once all the blood was off he looked at me confused and released a terrifying “Meow?”.
Get him back in small cage and return to egg site where I cracked 1 completely, 1 slightly and let the last untouched. (Assuming he would figure out that there was yummy stuff inside all of them).
Released him, he enthusiastically lapped up the egg that was open and licked the egg that cracked, then once again looked at me and said “meow?” (and I am not kidding with the ? either, he was definately confused).
In the end we had to crack all 3 of them as he just couldn’t figure out what to do with them.
Maybe he is actually smarter and realises we will do the work for him…

Fairwells and alcohol
We always try have a party of sorts for people’s fairwells and when Genesis left it was no exception. Its tradition for everyone to make a dessert of some kind and we usually end up having those for dinner. We also end up playing games that involve alcohol. This time we had some limited rum, so our head volunteer made these amazing rum drinks (rum, sugar, lemon and water). Amazing! When the rum ran out we turned to the locally made stuff. Its called agua chiente (spelling?) and I am fairly certain you can use it to strip paint. In South Africa we would call it witblitz (white lightning) and in the states moonshine. Its made from maize I believe and the trick is to not smell it before you drink it. However mix it with something and you barely taste it, which can be very very dangerous.

Rainy season in the rainforest
When you talk about the rainforest you assume there are daily showers and that it always feels hot and humid. However make it rainy season and you can rapidly run out of dry clothing. One one particularly intense day it rained cats and dogs, torrential downpour would be an understatement. The kind of rain where rain jeckets and ponchos do no good. I had big tour with 2 of the girls and we were saturated almost immediately. Followed immediately by 2 tours. Giving me only 10min for lunch before afternoon feeding, it was still raining, where I was volunteered for big tour. They love deciding who does what in Spanish and leaving out a couple of us who don’t realise they have decided. But it was all good and I was wet anyway, whats another gallon of rain down your pants.

Beata strikes again
On Sunday I headed down to clean the bathrooms and have a quick shower before our volunteer meeting. When I went into my side of the house all doors were closed. When I came out the other living room door was open. This could mean only one thing and I found Beata (spider monkey) sitting on Sarah’s shelves. I tried to coax her out but she decided she wanted to roam around a little and climbed over the top of the wall into Sara’s (Spain) room, she was away and it was padlocked so I couldn’t get in, but I could hear her searching for things. Finally Beata reemerged in Sarah’s room but then promptly climbed back into Sara’s and then over into Lukas’ room. This was continued for about 20minutes, with me yelling for help every 5minutes. Finally someone came and we continued to try get her out. Ever since she bit me I have been a bit more cautious around her. After about 25minutes of chasing her from room to room and just as Lukas was about to come save the day she put her arms out and let me pick her up as if that was all I had had to do from the very beginning. Locking doors became a mission for me after that.

Martin
That afternoon we decided to return Martin the wooley monkey to the cage he shared with Herman. His wound on his shoulder had healed nicely and we figured he would be ok in the cage. That night around 9pm, while we were relaxing in the living room, Lukas came down and said I was needed in the vet room. He had been counting kinkajous when Martin had been attacked by something again, but had passed out when he tried to help (he is a very sensitive guy). So up I went in the pouring rain, and what a sorry sight I found. We think that something got him through the fence. He had 3 large gashes on his head, his right thumb was split almost in half, he had bite wounds on every appendage and a large chunk missing from his tail. He was screaming bitterly and we all trying to figure out exactly what and how we were going to treat him. It was finally decided to use only local anesthetic and stitch the wounds. We only finished about 2hrs later and when Martin resembled the monkey version of frankenstein. He now faces another few weeks of daily cleanings and treatments until his wounds heal and we have figured out the problem with keeping him safe in the cage. The best solution is to put chicken wire over the whole cage, but its $500 (US) for just the supplies, more for labor.

A long week ends
Due to the delicate nature of days off this week has been 7 days straight on, and I think I am ready to drop. My knees are starting to kill me and I end up in bed by 7.30pm almost every night. Can I really feel this old at 33?? Luckily I have 2days off in Tena, which means a whole lot of sleeping, eating and warm showers would should hopefully help me recover before returning.

Freddy, Monica and Flavio (Kichwa volunteers) have the day off too so we all headed into town together and went out for pizza. I veered away from my usual fanta and had a beer instead, and it was a good change with company. Then I returned to the hostel and remained comatose for about the next 12hrs.

Join me as I start my 2nd and last month of volunteering in my next post…

 

AmaZoonico: Days 36-42 – Week 3 in the Jungle

The management wish to apologize for any delays you might have experienced with updates. Due to technical difficulties involving internet access in the jungle we are a little behind.

April 10th to 16th 2011

Week 3 in the Jungle

The joys of things that bite in the night
In the morning I woke up at the hostel covered in small red bites. Having previously managed a hostel my first thoughts were bed bugs. But the owner assured me they had no such issue and it was most likely the beastly sand flies and mosquitoes who got me. in the end I believed him as the bites did appear more sand fly like in nature. I went back to sort out some things and suddenly his mother appeared (she is the most darling old lady ever and always calls me “mi amor”). She indicated for me to put my feet up on the side table and then proceeded to smear a green liquid that smelled like menthol all over my legs, feet and arms. Needless to say, that afternoon I went on the hunt for some of this amazing stuff.
I permanently carry a small tin of mentol chino with me when I do tours and this was like a liquid form of it. Mentol chino is about the only thing, other than copious amounts of cortizone cream, that helps the itchiness… speaking of which where the heck is my tin, ahhhh I hate sand flies!!!!

My very own room
When I got back to AmaZoonico I found out that none of the others wanted the newly available single room that was recently vacated. So I immediately started moving. It has 2 lovely windows, a shelf and a bed side “table”. Fantastic! However it is above the kitchen (which can get very noisy) and its wain wall by the bed is the one facing the popular lounge, which means talking to all hours of the night and cigarette smoke. But hey, its my own room!

A tale of a tail
When a group of woolly monkeys were due to be released we realised that one of them had an injured tail. After close inspection (involving 4 people holding him down and one looking at it) we realised it was most likely broken but as there was still blood flow we decided to bandage it and see how it healed. We believe he was sitting with his tail outside his cage when another wild monkey came up and broke it right below the part they use to grip things with (prehensile). After an initial check I headed off to do a tour and Michael (the manager) headed off to Tena for his weekend off.

Shortly after my tour ended I was called to help with Francisco again, it turns out he had started chewing on the injured section and was now causing severe damage. We bandaged it up again and called the vet in Quito we work with. His suggestion was to amputate the section before infection set in. We then called Michael to tell him his weekend off had come to an end. He returned the next day and preparations were made. We still had no vet, the vet from Quito was unable to come and so it was up to Michael to do the deed. Upto this point the only amputations he had made were on necropsies (autopsy on an animal), so this was going to prove interesting.

With limited equipment I became the monitoring machine with my stethoscope and watch. I made up a monitoring sheet to keep things in order and then we were on our way. It was really difficult cutting through tendons and moving the skin and hair away from the bone and then came the decision of where to cut. If we cut too high it would mean a redo and the wound wouldn’t heal well. If we cut too low we would remove part of his healthy tail. Luckily Michael’s guess seemed well aimed and the cut was clean. As we were starting to close up, Francisco decided to start waking up which lead to mild panic as we tried to turn up the anesthetic and hold him down at the same time. In the end the surgery appeared to be a success, Francisco woke up without problems and appeared to be leaving his tail alone. Michael was so impressed by how well it went he bought us all a soda.

Volunteer Dynamics
It is inevitable to find the occasional issue when you take a large bunch of people of different ages and cultures and push them together. At present the majority of volunteers were female and under 22 from Europe. Its never a good idea when there are too many girls barely out of highschool in a group together and they proved this when they called me into a room and sat me down and proceeded to tell me that I wasn’t working hard enough. This was a bit of a shock as I was barely on my 2nd week and still didn’t know everything, they named a few instances from that (all of which turned out to be when I was in surgery). When our head volunteer arrived she looked fairly concerned at this apparent gang up. So it turns out that I am back in highschool, and still not popular. It really took its toll on me and I seriously started considering leaving. Working with a bunch of youngsters who refuse to speak anything but spanish (great for immersion but you need someone to give you the occasional translation) and who treat you like someone who isn’t worth being there was not my idea of fun. But after chatting with Sarah I decided to stick it out and just focused on myself instead of trying to be part of the group. In the end I am very thankful to her advice, as groups change and so do the dynamics.

Tours in foreign languages
Today during fruit delivery we had a Belgium group arrive for a tour. Lukas, from Holland, could have done the tour but he is much more useful with the fruit carrying than I am. So I got to do my first tour in Afrikaans (a form of Dutch spoken in South Africa). It was a lot of fun and the most amusing part is that every time I said something they all got this look on their faces and said “oh how cute”. I switched to English after the 5th time they said this. It was all rather amusing and great practice for my Spanish.

Happy Valentines
I spent my valentines in Tena with my usual pizza and fanta. Turns out I have 2 days in a row off. the down side is that it is only 1 day after my last day off and means I will most likely have to work 7 days straight, but on the upside I really need a couple days to myself and away from the highschool atmosphere.

Stay tuned to see if I survive repeating highschool and how dynamics start changing