First week at Santa Martha Rescue Center

We have finished our first week of working at Santa Martha Wildlife Rescue Center. It has turned out to be a lot more physical work than we had expected, but that is in part due to the surplus of volunteers.

Some of the animals at the moment are: lions, jaguar, pumas, cabezas, coaties, kinkajoos, ocelots, andean bears, parrots (also mackaws), eagles, snakes, iguanas, toucan, lamas, sheep, turtles and tortoises. Most of these animals were either kept as pets (even an eagle), or mistreated in a zoo or circus. Some animals cannot be rehabilited or released because they are either tame, injured or not indigenous to Ecuador and not welcome in their home country. The week before we arrived many monkeys and turtles were release back into the wild. There are also pigs, rabbits and guinea pigs for emergency food.

There are 18 volunteers at the moment, which is the maximum capacity. Most of them are from Europe (England, Norway, Ireland, Germany), United States and New Zealand. Working hours are from 8am-1pm and 4pm-6pm. The morning shift is usually exhausting. It´s hard work mentally and physically, but it´s also fun and rewarding. Some of the things we have done: cleaning animals cages (amongst others lions and cabezas produce a large amount of poo!), feeding animals (mostly fruit we cut up and want to eat ourselves, but also raw meat and whole chickens), cutting down trees with machetes, building stairs (with shovels, hoes, saws, hammers, and the wood we cut up). Especially building the stairs is hard work giving most of us nice blisters, but it´s fun to do work we haven´t done before and the final result is quite impressive. We both really liked working with machetes. Paulien could only do it for a little bit, but Brian did it 5 hours / day and had trouble holding his toothbrush properly afterwards. We get to do a lot of construction work because there are a lot of volunteers, so there is less time with the animals than when there are less volunteers.

The road up from the town is really bumpy cobblestone and dirt. It´s basically only accessible to us with a white pick-up truck taxi (there are lots of crazy dogs and the hill is really steep). In the town there is not much to get besides basic vegetables and odd food in tiny stores that carry a limited selection, but we managed to create some yummy meals anyway.

The afternoons and nights we usually spend freshening up, grocery shopping, cooking, eating and relaxing (maybe watching a movie or Family Guy episodes). There are 3 different houses for the volunteers (we are in the most basic house and longer term volunteers are often in the house with the more luxury).

The area is beautiful with green hills and a few snow capped mountains. We can supposedly see Cotopaxi (5897 meter volcano) and the Iliniza mountains.

We finished up our Saturday morning cleaning and feeding and came down in a white pickup truck taxi with 17 volunteers and their bags (some volunteers were leaving). It was an interesting 15 minute ride down the bumpy road - a sight you wouldn´t see in North America or Europe. Paulien was laying down on 3 girls in the back seat and Brian rode standing on the bumper (we went pretty slow). We´re in Quito till Sunday night with 9 other volunteers. Tomorrow we´re both going to the middle of the earth (Mitad del Mundo) to do some scientific experiments at the equator.

After next week we´ll put up some more photos of the work and the animals. We´ve been too busy, tired or dirty to take many photos.