Travel Tree City/State: Amazon Rainforest Country: ECUADOR GVI Amazon Research Volunteering REQUEST MORE INFORMATION »» Global Vision International 3 High Street St Albans Herts UNITED KINGDOM AL3 4ED Phone: 01727 250 250 www.gvi.co.uk Program description: We had three mingas this week. For those who haven’t experienced one first-hand, a minga is when various people from a community join hands to work on a project that usually involves major manual labour (and a free lunch!). We’re building a grey water filtration system in camp, so the first minga involved hauling sacks of wet sand up from the stream into camp. The second, slightly more enjoyable minga, took place at the Yachana High School, where we helped the students build a path and dig trenches for a new snail farm (as you do!). Finally, we moved a huge pile of chonta wood from the road into camp, which took hours – and as always after a minga, lunch was very much appreciated that day! On Thursday afternoon most of the volunteers made the two hour long hike to one of the satellite camps on the other side of the reserve, laden with sleeping bags, jungle hammocks, bug spray by the gallon, and enough granola and tea bags to last us till lunch the next day. We set up camp and prepared for our amphibian survey of a nearby Laguna, then waited until dark before setting off. The Laguna was littered with monkey frogs, tree snakes and gigantic water spiders, and although we didn’t get to encounter any of the resident caiman, there was a puma sighting! Freddy, one of the students from the High School, even taught us how to catch fish with our bare hands. Our local bird survey, scheduled for 5.30am was rained off, giving us an extra few hours in our hammocks and an early start for the hike back. So after all that hard work we definitely deserved to let our hair down on Saturday night! We had a tribal theme night, and with everyone split into two tribes, peoples’ competitive spirits were flaring all week, and the tribal leaders were both determined to thrash each other. There were crazy tribal outfits, wacky dances and the Hakka…and that was before we even sat down for dinner! The teams’ training week skills were put to the test in fiendishly tricky games, including an impossible ‘trail walk’, requiring you to walk along a thin line whilst looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars (much harder than it sounds), and guessing song names just from the intros which were sung expertly/appallingly by the tribal leaders. By GVI Amazon Volunteer, June 2008 Read updates from the project base on the GVI Amazon blog! Join GVI’s research team in the Ecuadorian Amazon and … Change your World! 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