More on What’s Happening (-Jess and Andrew)

Jess’s work at PROCREL has developed slowly- there is not much space at the office and so she got handed several hundred pages of Spanish documents to read (eep!) in order to catch up on their past and present activities and try to start looking for a way to make herself useful.

Meanwhile, Andrew has gone a couple times to the IIAP field station (all by himself!) to help work on reproduction studies at the experimental farm for Amazon fish species, which mostly involved grabbing them out of big nets, squeezing them for gametes (i.e. sperm and eggs), and injecting a few with hormones to induce gamete release. (Fun fun!) One day, he even got to take the first trip up the Rio Nanay to scout out locations for water quality testing.

Andrew’s been watching the World Series on the Spanish ESPN channel and he played soccer again on Friday night (this time at the big fancy Iquitos city soccer stadium). We made a recent trip to the gym and were gifted(?) with the attention of the resident personal trainer who worked us both to the point of blacking out. Yay for sports.

A couple days ago, Noam Chany (the ornithologist who helped us find our apartment), invited us to meet with a student group called CANATURA (Club de Amigos de Natura). They are involved in a lot of environmental education activities and at the moment they are planning a big festival to celebrate the area’s biodiversity, with an emphasis on a newly discovered endemic bird. One of the most interesting things about the CANATURA program is that in return for their service, volunteers are supposed to receive free English lessons. On Wednesday night Noam had us signed up and scheduled for teaching classes everyday, starting immediately, so we got launched in fairly quickly. Andrew went to the first lesson by himself, and was thoroughly entertained as an Israeli man named Uri taught the alphabet song, some common conversation words, and then led the class in a round of “We Shall Overcome” which sounded surprisingly good. At the end of the class Uri asked Andrew to teach a song the next time, so he came home and racked his brain for things that would be appropriate. When we both showed up the next day, he asked us to teach not just one song, but a little over an hour’s worth of the class. So, we taught them the “Hokey Pokey” (with dance!) and went through the human body parts, then “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (in honor of the World Series), and a round with “When the Saints” and “Swing Low”. So, along those lines, WE NEED IDEAS FOR MORE SONGS (simple, well-known, easy to sing without accompaniment) to teach in our next classes. Since they’re all college-aged biology students who are very interested in learning Enlgish, it looks to be really enjoyable and rewarding, especially if we can get them to help us with our Spanish along the way and then we can all talk biology!

Tomorrow we leave on our first trip to the campo with Jess’s workgroup, up the river to three villages where we will be assisting with several community service projects. We’ll get back in a week, hopefully with tons of interesting stories and pictures and videos to share. In the meantime, Happy Halloween!