Thursday,
August 2nd
Glenda
came back from vacation today! She seems super refreshed, rested, and happy,
which is great. She brought back lots of stuff for the park…new plants,
supplies, tools, and food! The plants she brought are part of the mangrove
reforestation project, so we put them in black plastic bags with fresh soil to
help them grow. It was messy, but fun work. We planted over 50 plants and
saplings.
Unloading all of the new plants and supplies
When we
took a break to go swimming, two girls came and brought us an injured hawksbill
turtle. Luckily, we had just filled up and cleaned the sea turtle holding pool.
It was cool to see a live one here because they are super rare in Guatemala. We
took a look at it and only saw a couple shallow cuts on its plastron (belly),
which was good. Mariachi called the turtle vets in Guatemala City to come down,
take blood samples, and give her a full examination. They will hopefully be
here in the next day or so. It was quite a challenge to deal with Mariachi
though. He knows a lot about running a hatchery, but not about dealing with
live turtles. First, he and Willi kept taking it in and out of the water, which
is super stressful. Second, he wanted to feed it shrimp right after putting it
in the pool. The turtle was
so stressed that eating was a bad idea. Plus, turtles don’t have to eat every
day, so waiting a day or two is better. I’m no expert either, but I was able to
convince him to go about things in a better way. At the end, I filled out the
sea turtle stranding form and got to take measurements on a live turtle for
once instead of a dead turtle!!!
A view of the hawksbill in the holding tank
A great look at the turtle's head and beak
For
dinner, we went with Alice to a local woman named Chana’s house. She made us
salad, omelets, tortillas, fish (for the people that eat seafood), rolls, a
squash dish, and a pasta dish. It was super delicious! Afterwards, we walked to
the tienda to get some ice cream, and then we headed to the circus.
I was
really curious to see how it would differ from a circus in the States. The
first act was a group of exotic dancers. One of the dancers was pregnant, which
was odd to see. They also had little girls on stage with the dancers…it was all
just really uncomfortable. The next act was three clowns. Of course everything was in
Spanish, so I didn’t understand a lot of it, but it was still funny. After that
was a little boy who laid on his back and rolled and balanced things with his
feet. He had to be only 7 or 8, but he was SO good! One of the objects even had
fire on it! Next, came the clowns again and this time they did a skit about the
stereotypes of gringos, French people, and Chinese people. It was hilarious…not
PC, but still funny! The second to last act was a fire breather. He didn’t
really do anything special or out of the ordinary though. The last act was a
skit on domestic violence with the clowns. All the Guatemalans thought that it
was super funny. It was really weird and I didn’t know what to make of it. The
circus was quite the experience and I’m glad I got to go. I don’t know if I
would see it again, but it was fun once.
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