All I do is pick up poo!!!

For the last two weeks Sean has been walking around Parque Machia with his six week beard dragging his rubber boots chanting ¨all i do is pick up poo!¨ so it only seemed fitting that it would be the title to this blog and give you a vague idea of what we have been doing for the past two weeks.

Not to lead you to the conclusion that we have been not enjoying ourselves. On the contrary we have been having an experience that will never be forgotten!

17 days ago we arrived in the humid Amazonian town Villa Tunari equipped with a duffel bag full of food and not a clue in the world of what to expect. The place was deserted and the park was closed. We had come 9 hours and hundreds of miles to volunteer at the animal refuge center of Parque Machia with very little guidance. We were told by the park (via email) to ¨just arrive¨ and see if there is availability and work for you. If there is you are placed where they need you most and if not, well then you leave. After scouring the park for someone, anyone, to give us some direction or information we encountered a tourist park agent who told us to go to the cafe below the park where we soon after met a passing through volunteer who gave us a bit of the low down - tour of the park at 5pm and job placement and introduction to the park at 7pm (something helpful they don´t mention to you on the website).

At 5 the tour came of the Parque. There were 9 departments to work in: the clinic (working with newly arrived monkeys and various animals), Quarantine (a transitional place for spider and capuchin monkeys), small animals (a housing for turtles, tyra´s and tehorns), birds (rehabilitating 50 types of various birds) and then there were 3 monkey parks where they had rehabilited wild monkeys, a Andean bear, and large cats (pumas and ocelots). The 3 latter are generally reserved for volunteers who are staying a month or longer. So in short there were only 4 options available for Sean and I, much more than we had thought or knew about.

Things really didn´t start out all that well for us. Two other girls wanting to volunteer had also arrived that day, in which we were all given the tour and taken into the office together. After an introduction of the Parque and its rules we were given job placements. Sean was given the job at the clinic because he was male (the park prefered males in that particular position because the newly arrived monkeys tended to be more aggressive towards females) and then Keith, the director of the park, turned to us three girls and told us there was only 2 positions available in the quarantine (working with the monkeys) and the other position was in birds. All three of us were admantly protesting that we didn´t want to work with birds so it came down to a hat draw - thankful I wasn´t picked for the bird position but the girl who was wasn´t happy in the slightest about it, so you can imagine that everything began quite awkwardly.

After that we were issued our room number and house and were sent off to find them in the dark. When we researched the Parque we knew what we were getting ourselves into - we knew that the living conditions weren´t great and that we were going to be working hard but at the same time we really didn´t know what to expect. Our room was bearable, for lack of a better word. Our first reaction was: how will we live in this place for 2 weeks but after a mosquito net, a fresh sheet and plugging the holes in the screens we made it our do-able ¨in the mean-time home¨. We still lived amongst the invading insects, duct-taped doors, odd smells, hay mattresses and electrical taped shower knob but after a couple days we no longer thought about it, that is until Sean was electricuted twice.

My first day of work my body was intensely shocked. We went from frolicking from city to city doing whatever we pleased when ever we pleased to 12 hours of hard labor for 15 days straight. I endured callouses on my hands, pained feet and aching back of a 90 year old but some how none of it mattered and after a couple days I just became a machine, robotically working like I had been doing it for years.

The monkeys were absolutely amazing, interesting, cute, funny, beautiful and every other like adjective (even the ones who bite me).

Every day they would do something so clever and so human like that I would be beside myself and enthralled with curiousity and eager just to sit there to watch and play with them for hours on end. Most of the time I loved watching them take on the average things like a bucket of water, a scrub brush or the noises that two rocks made banging together.

It was hilarious how much they loved empty plastic water bottles and learning how to screw and unscrew the tops on and off or climbing into my shirt and poking their heads out the other end.

It was easy to forget about time there and the hard work or long hours spent. And with every passing day they got to know me and trust me a bit more and every day was more rewarding than the last and by the end neither Sean or I were ready to say goodbye.

And saying goodbye was really hard to do. We had worked so hard for their trust and love and in so many ways our time was not up there. But I must admit that I know how incrediably lucky we were to have such a rare and hands on experience there being in this park. And the park itself had so much to offer from the occasional bear and sloth sighting, to monkeys swinging and cooing above you in the trees at every given moment, to baby ocelots wandering about the grass and jungle trails at your finger tips.

But I know you all (well those who know about it) are dying to hear the story of the monkey that pierced a hole through my ear... :-) The monkey´s name is William and he is notorious for biting people and leaving them with a memorable scar from Parque Machia (mostly girls since monkeys have this weird connection with males). William first bite me on my hand my first day, drawing first blood and giving him a taste of me. He left what I think will be a temporary scar on my hand but an obvious image of teeth. I did nothing to provoke this, he just merely decided that he didn´t like the look of my face and the next day decided to jump on my head, clawing at my face (yes he left another temporary scar on my left cheek) and attacking the closest thing to his face, my poor ear. He sunk his incisors so deep into the top cartilage of my ear that his teeth went in on the front side and came out through the back. I pulled him off of me which (I think) ultimately made it worse because he drug his teeth across the top part of my ear (not splitting skin or anything) but making two other little holes near it.

I was more startled than I was in pain and luckily it really didn´t hurt all that much there after. Only when the other curious monkeys would climb on my head and tear off the bandage and pick at it did the pain really set in. Needless to say, I stayed away from William who constantly lunged at me every chance he got, but he was on a rope and lead so most of the time I could just stay out of his reach. I got over it quick and couldn´t help but fall in love with monkeys despite all the other battle wounds we endured there (which was many little skin breaking bites and scratches) but really they are just people without a language and generally people without a language have to express their dislikes in other ways right?!?!

Sean had a very similar job to mine (cleaning cages, feeding and tending to the monkeys needs) though he worked alone (and I worked with 4 others tending to 80 monkeys).

He was in charge of 27 monkeys, all of which really liked him with the exception of one who constantly tore his shirt, making it shorter and shorter each day until he was almost showing his mid-drift (it was pretty hilarious) and gave him his deepest wound on his shoulder. I think his favorite monkey was a monkey named Monkey who groomed him everyday from head to toe, cleaning his finger nails and picking god knows what out of his hair.

At times Sean would call out to me (our departments were next to each other) and tell that Monkey was doing his laundry and so I would look over and see Monkey picking all the bits off of Seans shirt and searching his pants pockets. Everyone was amazed at how much this monkey loved Sean because supposively he is an impossible monkey for all the long timers who have the scars and stitches to prove it. So when we left you can imagine how much the Vets in the clinic were really sad to see him go.

We worked amongst 30-40 of the coolest people who were traveling and living just like us. There was a cafe at the edge of the park run by the sweetest family who made us breakfast, lunch and snacks and where all the volunteers congregated at breakfast and lunch to tell stories and share a laugh about their days.

Instantly we became part of this family and a member of the community. All the volunteers lived in three hostels not far from each other and at night we would all cross the scary bridge where large logging and petrolum trucks flew past to have dinner in the small town. Days before our departure we learned that an anconda lived in our house, two rooms over from us... So we poked our heads into the tiny hole made in the door and saw the largest anconda sleeping in a bucket of water pretty much next door to where we had been sleeping for the past two weeks. Apparently the anconda had been donated to the park but the park had no where to put him so in the time being they put him in room one until they could find a better suiting spot for him.

Now we are in the beautiful town of Sucre in the South of Bolivia where we are collecting ourselves, doing laundry and nursing our healing insect and monkey bites. We had a lounging day yesterday of sleep and movies while today we will tour the historic town where buildings and art have been standing since the 1600´s. From here we will head to Unuyi, the Salt Flats of Bolivia and then we are off to Argentina! So until then... Ciao! Lyndsay and Sean