Busy Town

Safety
Safety is defined differently here. People generally do not wear seat belts, kids climb dangerously high trees and everyone walks in the road due to the lack of sidewalks. When we were in Nicaragua, we stuffed 20 people into a van that seated 16 and drove on highways for a couple of hours.
I often see children sitting on their parents’ laps in cars, even in the driver’s seat. One gentleman told me his 4 year-old son steers the last leg of their daily trip home from work and school on their four-wheeled motorcycle. Dad obviously has his feet on the gas and brake and the road is rural, but I still shudder at the thought of their hitting a large hole or a rock, of which there are no shortages, and the little boy flying over the handlebars. At least this guy and his son wear helmets. Most people do not. I have seen two adults riding a motorcycle, each with a child in his or her lap, zipping along the narrow, rocky roads with none of the four wearing a helmet.
Fortunately, the school requires students to wear seatbelts and the buses move very slowly over the roads, particularly on the steep uphill sections. I do worry about the brakes going out while a bus is making a controlled descent down one of the many, steep downhill runs.
Fire Fighting
One night recently, another teacher told me that, back in December, her son lit a candle in his bedroom and threw the smoldering match in the trash can. The match lit some paper, and before anyone could do anything, it grew into a fire that destroyed all his clothes and belongings and created smoke damage throughout the rest of the house. I went home that evening and, finding our power still out, lit candles and began to think about what would happen if we had a fire in the house. Homes do not typically have smoke detectors or fire extinguishers. There is no fire department.
Last night, my questions were answered when there was a fire in a local hotel. Apparently, a central person in a town about an hour away was notified of the fire. This person started a phone tree to businesses and homes near the fire to alert them of the fire in their area. Local hotels and restaurants DO have fire extinguishers, and they were instructed to take them to the scene. Dozens of citizens were drawn to the fire and they helped drag out people and items from the building. No one died or was seriously injured, but there was significant damage to one section of the hotel.
Monkey Business
A couple of students and I were taking Dolly’s latest group of visitors (from the Kiwanis Club in Madison, Wisconsin) on a hike up to the kiosk on the school grounds when I heard something rustling in the treetops. I asked the group if we could stop and listen, and soon enough, a troop of howler monkeys paraded by above us. One was a mother with a baby on her back- so cute. One of the students knew how to “call” to them, and the howlers howled back at us. Howler monkeys are known to throw things at humans, but this group just stopped and stared at us one at a time and then moved on. The other student, who moved here from Nicaragua four years ago, said he had never seen a howler monkey before. They were quite a sight.

I spent today talking with a group of college student interns Dolly is hosting for four weeks, each of whom is working on an individual project on our campus. I also spent time with two Cloud Forest School volunteers who just needed some attention, and then I helped Dolly’s current visitors prepare some big, old, metal recycling bins for repairs and repainting. I took some visitors with me while I retrieved animal collection buckets from the woods that needed drainage holes drilled in them. I then guided several students through the last steps of mapping the trails on the campus, and we put the finishing touches on our draft of a map that will be transferred onto a wooden sign tomorrow.

It was Grand Central Station in our office, and at one point I just had to make everyone stop and look so I could take a picture. It is amazing how many simultaneous projects we are working on and how many people are working with us.