Samo

Saturday, September 8^th

Glenda didn’t let me go on patrols last night or crawl counts this morning. She wants me to rest, which is for the best, but I feel so useless when all I’m doing is sitting in a hammock. It actually has been a blessing in disguise though because I finally have time to look into fundraising options for the new hatchery. I’ve been so busy managing the volunteers and looking after the baby turtles that I’ve had no time to look into a new hatchery. I found a site called Start Some Good, which is like Kickstarter for charities. For this site, you have to submit a venture proposal and once they accept it, you can start your fundraising campaign. Today, I wrote a venture proposal, which I sent off to Colum to revise. Once our proposal is accepted and we make the campaign site, I will post it on here!

In other news, I still feel like crap, but we got a kitten for the parque! Alice brought him over late last night. I guess some kids gave him to her, but she didn’t want to keep him. Glenda loves cats, so I figured she would want him. She named him Samo. I’m not a big cat person, but he is adorable. It has been funny watching him wander around the visitor center all day. Paco seems to be scared of him, which is funny because he is like 7x his size haha.

We also got another volunteer named Riikka from Finland. It is awesome that she is here because she volunteered back in 2010, so she basically knows how to do everything. I spent most of the afternoon talking to her and letting her know what is different about the parque now.

In the evening, I went on patrol with Riikka. The parlameros kept telling us turtles were coming up but we weren’t even finding tracks. Finally, we came across a parlamero carrying eggs. He gave us a donation, which made us feel like the walk hadn’t been for nothing. Then, when we were about 1.5km away from the parque we came across a turtle surrounded by tourists. We got the donation, and then, the tourists bought the nest for us. I was pleasantly surprised. Usually the Guatemala City tourists are not so eco-minded. They wanted to help bury the eggs, so I took them back to the parque. The only problem was that they walked as slow as molasses! It took us 45 minutes to walk what should have taken max 20 minutes. By the time we got to the parque and buried the eggs, it was around 1:00am and I had to get up around 4:30am to do crawl counts. I was happy that they bought the eggs for us, but I really wish they could’ve sped things up!