Welcome to my office

I know it probably seems like all I do is have fun crazy adventures but, that´s because I tend to only blog about the out of the ordinary things in my life. Then, the other day while I watched a neighbor climbing around barefoot on bamboo while building an open air meeting place at my reserve I thought, hell, my ordinary day things aren´t so ordinary for my friends and family in the states, especially those that sit in offices all day, work on this thing called a computer (that I am currently trying to make do what I want it to do) and crave the outdoors. So, this blog is about my office.

The majority of my projects during my service have been with the Lalo Loor Dry Tropical forest reserve. My counterpart, The Ceiba Foundation for Tropical Conservation, has put me in charge of the Environmental and Tourist Center for the reserve. This includes a beautiful round yellow building that I have filled with tourist information, flora and fauna facts and pictures, conservation tidbits and some interesting stuff about tropical marine life. Basically, I take the foundation’s ideas and try my best to put them into reality. So far, so good. All of my work really has paid off and on September, 11th we officially opened the center and hirer a local employee. Maria is from Tabuga, is super willing to learn and is right now training under me. It all seems silly sometimes that I have arrived at this point where I am training someone to do a job that I just started doing one day. I had some background training with the Peace Corps but mostly, it was all about personality, adapting, being creative and desire. Now, what I was doing for the reserve created a job here and I am happily helping Maria learn everything I have learned and try to be as chipper, creative and friendly as possible. Basically, she gets to learn to be me, but cuter, with better Spanish and she gets paid.

Now that I am slowly handing over my responsibilities to Maria I can really get to the juicy stuff, which in my office means design an environmental education plan for the county, train Maria to do the environmental education activities, work with my buddy Máximo to be a informational and dynamic trail guide and hopefully get hundreds of kids frolicking through the forest throughout the next year. A lot of it is fun and games but atleast I am getting stuff done. And, I don´t want to rub it in, but I love my office.

In addition, I do a lot of stuff within the community. I teach English and sex education in the high school. I helped start a community bank, we recently passed $1,200 in the box (literally, a box) and have held bingos and raffles to make more money. My other projects include an association that is working in leadership and social action in the region as well as helping on a biological corridor project with Ceiba, the Ministry of Environment, the local government and local land owners. Not to mention, I am writing an environmental education manual with two other PCVs and continue my overly-rewarding work with teenage girl’s leadership camps. The next one takes place in the entrance to the Amazon outside of Tena in November.

Sometimes I imagine myself in another kind of office and maybe I´ll be there some day. For now, I love my office and I love my work. As much fun as all my adventures have been, what makes me happiest is being in Tabuga, living my work and doing the best I can with my best friends, see below, Maximo, Bigote (means mustache in spanish) and I are our lunch break.