Vacay!!!...Peace Corps style

So I got home this week from a nearly two-week-long trip to Peten, the northern region of Guatemala near the border of Belize. Katie, Dave and I spent a week volunteering at a wild animal rescue center and then spent a day walking around the ancient Mayan ruins of Tikal.

Working at the animal center was amazing. We showed up unannounced and they put us to work within the first half hour, cleaning up bird shit. We worked with the animals (feeding them and cleaning their cages) three times a day and then worked on other small projects around the center in between those shifts (like shoveling out a huge compost pile of animal poop and rotting food that had been festering for six months...yum!). We went swimming almost every day in lake Peten Itza, which is home to more than a few crocodiles (that was kinda creepy).

I got to work in cages with Amazon parrots, a toucan, young spider monkeys, howler monkeys and a paca (a rodent that looks kinda like an armadillo). Those are pretty much the only animals that inexperienced volunteers get to work with. The center also cares for a jaguar, margays (carnivorous felines about the size of house cats two ocelots (medium-sized carnivorous cats), baby crocodiles, infant spider and howler monkeys, foxes, scarlet macaws and probably a few others I'm forgetting. If you stay for an extended period of time you get to help hand raise the baby monkeys.

Many of the animals are rescued from the black market or from private homes that are illegally keeping them as pets. Others have been taken in because of debilitating injuries. The goal for all the animals is to rehabilitate them and release them back into the wild, although it doesn't always work out that way. For the larger cats, the center still doesn't have enough land or infrastructure to fully rehabilitate them so that they can learn to be self-sustainable in the wild. There are also some animals that have been around humans for too long or who have injuries too severe to allow them to safely return to their natural habitat. In those cases, the animals are given to zoos or private collections, or kept there at the visitor's education center.

It was a really great experience and if you're ever traveling through Guatemala, I highly recommend it. The name of the center is ARCAS (Asociacion Rescate de Conservacion Vida Silvestre). You can Google their web page for more information.

As much as I loved our time at ARCAS, after spending a week getting pooped and peed on by birds and monkeys, it was nice when we headed back over to the town of Flores, a quiet little beachy resort-ish kind of town. We were there for two nights and enjoyed some great meals and had a good time going out at night. We spent all day Sunday at the ruins in Tikal. I was absolutely blown away. It was really like walking through a time portal and getting to experience another world. It's a definite must-see if you're ever in Guatemala.

Pictures are coming as soon as I can get to an internet cafe with decent speed.

Back in the swing...for now

I'm now back in site working on home improvements and hoping to get some paperwork done for a project we're doing in one of my schools (more on that later) before heading up to Mexico with Ashleigh next week. I can't believe how fast the break is flying by. I've got so much planned it feels like as soon as I get back from a trip I'm already preparing for the next one, but it's nice to be busy that way.

Hope all is well with everyone back home. I miss you all like crazy. Drop me a line sometime, or better yet, mail me a letter. Email me and I'll send you the address (We're not supposed to post our exact location here because they're paranoid about stalkers). Peace out!