Field Trip May 2007: Day1

Monday 30th April
Four flights & four days later have finally arrived at the Bri-Bri reservation in Talamanca, close to the border with Panama. Spent two days in Washington + one day in NYC and finally saw Susan in her home environment. She seems much calmer when at home but still managed to exhaust me within a few hours :-) Really liked Washington though: a small back-water town full of irony and political wrangling, all of which somehow not at all representative of the intense amount of power concentrated there....

And now I'm here wondering what the next two weeks will be like. I'll be living in a small hut made of a jigsaw of bark, wood, vines and what looks like banana-leaf thatching to keep me dry. There is electricity here, but never guaranteed and often only for a few hours a day: the lack of rain is already effecting the hydro-electric plants.

My room is about as basic as it gets: a bed made of two planks, two layers of foam, an old blanket and a mosquito net left by the previous volunteer. Already found a cockroach on my bed and am visited by any number of insects whilst writing by torchlight.

Timoteo's family has already been very hospitable: his wife very quiet, his twelve children a mixture of young boys and older girls, all of whom have their own kids. So many grandchildren, even Timoteo doesn't know exactly how many or how old they are :-)

Early start tomorrow (6.30am). Timoteo is allowing me to start a little later: his day begins at 5am. Will be a tough two weeks, working seven to eight hours a day, then Spanish lessons which will probably only be possible after an hour's bus ride each way, every day...

Am looking forward to a good start tomorrow. Hope I'm up to it and am a help rather than a hinderance....

Too much television, even here!!