Volunteering at Santa Martha

October 6, 2009

We spent two weeks volunteering at Santa Martha Animal Rescue Centre near Tambillo, Ecuador. During our two weeks, we lived in houses with simple accomodations and cooked our own meals, had cake and movie nights with the other volunteers, and did lots of work with the animals. Monday through Friday we worked am 8am-1pm shift, had a 3 hour break, and then worked 4-6pm. During our time there, we worked with ocelots, pumas, lions, wooly monkeys, tamarin monkeys, Galapagos turtles, squirrel monkeys, mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, jaguars, macaws, hawks, eagles, parrots, pheasants, toucans...hope I´m not leaving anyone special out! Anyways, daily jobs were giving water and food to all the different animals, working in the kitchen preparing their meals, going into their cages and cleaning up their cages of their poop and leftover food (yum). There was also some common phrases such as the "sh*t bucket," which we always needed whether we were cleaning out cages or digging the hole. Speaking of digging the hole, during Week 1 that was a dreaded task-digging the new "sh*t hole" which would be used for dumping in all compost materials like poop, old food, dead chickens, hay...just a general...sh"t pit. :) Pardon my language!
Anyways, my FAVORITES were the two baby wooly monkeys in quaratine. They were little babies were in quaratine because they were so young and couldn´t be put in with others. You would get into the cage with them to clean out the poop, old food, and to clean their bed area..instantly they would jump on you and crawl all over you..they loved hair so they would pull my hat or bandana off and yank my hair a little, try to suck on your neck, eyes and sometimes try to breastfeed. :) haha. Anyways, they were the sweetest little guys around. If you were lucky, you might get to witness the ¨Monkeys on my back, monkeys down my shirt" song (Idan, that one´s for you). It was tough because you need to try not to play with them too much because they need to return to the wild and succeed and hopefully survive on their own. Lots of the animals there would not be returning to the wild because they were handicapped like blind, injured legs, too small, formerly abused, were in the circus...but Santa Martha did such a good job of making their life valuable despite the harships they faced.
So, overall, it was a great experience. The first few days, I couldn´t imagine doing two weeks of this kind of work, as it was harder and unlike anything I had done before. But I really got into the swing of things and was definitely sad to leave. It was fun meeting volunteers from all different places like England, Israel, Norway, Germany, etc. It was a completely new and challenging and rewarding experience for me, which I really enjoyed.