Family Dinner

Wednesday, September 12^th

I spent the morning continuing to help Riikka sand the shelves for the volunteer dorms. Some of the wood is in pretty bad shape because it has been sitting in this humidity for awhile, so it is taking us longer than we expected. Later, we took a break to try the ice cream that we made yesterday. It was delicious! I have found my new hobby. Next time I go to the tienda, I’m buying cream.

During free time, I went to the tower and Riikka showed me how to make a cool bracelet design. It turns out that she was actually the one who taught Maria, the bracelet lady, how to make most of her designs. While she was teaching me, she started to make up another design. This girl is so good with her hands!

My bracelet and the beach

The rest of the afternoon, we filled plastic bags with dirt to get ready for the mangrove reforestation. We use the plastic bags to plant mangrove seeds. There are 100s of bags that need to be filled before Wednesday of next week! I also helped a couple of volunteers who were doing excavations. We were able to release one live hatchling stuck at the bottom of the nest!

For dinner, we went to Myra’s house. Riikka is doing homestay with the family, so we all decided to go to her house and hang out. The food was delicious of course! I even kind of liked her eggplant dish and I normally don’t like eggplant. The best part about her cooking is that she uses lots of veggies in interesting ways. 

 

The spread

 My plate

Afterwards, everyone headed out for patrols except for me. I got the night off, but there were two turtles right by the park, so we bought the eggs and I buried them while everyone else went on their patrol. Another parlamero brought another nest right as I finished burying the other two nests, so I ended up burying eggs for close to 45 minutes. I was perfectly fine with staying up though because it meant more eggs!