8/8/2019 Football, Thunderstorms and Dirty Pots - GVI Amazon blog

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Philip Brown

Football, Thunderstorms and Dirty Pots

We have been back at base camp for a week now after our mid phase break. Those of us here for ten

weeks have settled back in and the new five week volunteers are adapting to life in the rainforest well.

We had heavy rain and impressive thunderstorms pretty much every day last week. Thursday was my

camp duty day and it tipped it down all morning which meant we had to leave some of our jobs, like

sweeping the board walks and burning the burnable waste untill the afternoon.

When you are rotered on to do camp duty for the day it is your responsibility (as a pair) to do all of the

cooking and cleaning for the day which means you end up infront of the sink for a good portion of the

day. There are pots to wash after breakfast, after mid morning snack, after lunch and after tea along

with occasional mugs or beakers turning up throughout the day. On a weekend, so everybody has a little

bit of time to rest, the duties are shared, with names being drawn from a hat. I drew washing up on

Friday night after a lovely meal. In addition to that, after lunch on Sunday, Jas, whose job it was to wash

up, had to go for a staff meeting so I stepped in and helped out. My pot luck job for Sunday was also

washing up after tea, which meant out of 12 meals in 4 days I washed up after 6 them!!!! Mum, when I

get home you can unplug the dishwasher.

So, what else have I been upto over the weekend other than wash up I hear you ask....

Saturday morning we went to Agua Santa which is a small community which everyone from the

surrounding area and the odd coach full of tourists decends upon to buy toiletries, clothes, cleanind

products food and drink at the market which is there every Saturday morning. In a few weeks time we

will be setting up a stall to explain to the local community a little bit more about what we do.

Saturday afternoon consisted of scraping termite tunnels systems from the wooden supports and beams

of the toilet and shower block. Once I’d scraped the tunnels off with a trowel, I then sprayed the

supports and beams with diesel. Spraying the supports was fine but when I did the beams above myhead I got a face full of diesel a couple of times which wasn’t pleasant. After dealing with the termites I

then cleared the gutters on the clothes drying area (it rains that much here you need a roof over where

you hang your clothes otherwise they would never dry).

Saturday night in camp is fun night and we had a super hero theme and had Team Hero vs Team

Nemesis competeing in a variety of challenges, testing everyones super power strength and skills.

Everybody got dressed up in a variety of ill fitting clothes and competed in the challenges which included

getting boiled sweets out of a bowl of flour with your teeth, a tree tomato and spoon race and a rescue

mission to find a plastic spider and plastic rat. In the end Team Nemesis won it by a whisker.

Sunday morning while everyone was having a well deserved lie in, I woke up early and went and had a

wash in the nearby stream. There are showeres here, but sometimes it is quite nice to have a quick

stream wash. Also you occasionally see something cool, a few weeks ago I saw a Fork Tailed Wood

Nymph – Thalurania furcata. This Sunday on the way back up the path I saw two Marbled Wood Quails

 – Odontophorus gujanensis emerge from the butress roots of a tree next to the path. They looked like

grouse in body shape but were slightly bigger and had a similar red dash above the eye. They have been

seen on the reserve before but are apparently quite hard to spot, so I was privelidged to see them.

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I spent most of the rest of the morning in the Library doing revisionfor the species ID test we have next

weekend. In the afternoon we went down to the local community of Puerto Rico to play football. We

started with mixed teams which varied in size as and when new players arrived or others had to leave.

In that game my team won 7-5. After a bit of a break we then played Ecuadorians vs Gringos, we lost 7-0

and got a right pasting.

We got back to camp in time for tea and while we were out, some of the guys who stayed back had

made a field oven. They dug a pit in the ground,put some rocks in there and had a small fire. When the

rocks get hot they hold their heat and when the flames had died down they put potatoes in with them.

For tea we had beautiful jacket potatoes with garlic butter. After which is immediatly hammered it

down with rain running off the roof like a waterfall.

After a weekend of washing up, termite control, gutter clearing, dressing up as super heroes, early

morning bird spotting, a bit of revision, a good game of footie and eating jacket potatoes, I am now

looking forward to a week ofsurveys. This week I will be doing a bird point count, setting up some sand

pads to hopefully get some mammal tracks, going on a bird mist net session and learning how to use

GPS to locate points on and map the reserve.

Living in the Amazon working on a GVI project is hard work. In the week you are busy doing surveys, at

the weekend you are busy doing camp duties and making links with the local communities and trying to

learn as much as you can about the local flora and fauna. When you do get chance to chill out or have a

bit of fun, it makes it all the more worth it. If you are thinking about coming out here, DO IT! It is great,

 just come prepared to work hard and learn lots.