La Barronna - Tortugas

This section is not neccessarily about me but it I consider it relevant to volunteering and after all it is my blog....

I visited a turtle sanctuary for the weekend with some other volunteers that are with Inlex gt.inlexca.org  to visit a German volunteer who had recently started volunteering there. La Barronna is a small fishing village on the border with El Salvador. A relatively steady income for the inhabitants for many years has been the sale of tortuga eggs. This has affected the numbers detrimentally and it will not be long before there are no more turtle eggs left. The project in La Barronna has two aspects. One is through education, by explaining the situation to the locals the project has managed to convince them to donate 20 percent of the eggs found to the sanctuary so that the eggs can be let to mature and realeased into the sea. The project also does a lot of work with education of kids and adults alike teaching them English, which helps create a good relationship and trust can be formed. The other aspect of the project concentrates on trying to find the turtle eggs before the locals so that more eggs can be cultivated in the sanctuary. This envloves 4 hour patrols of the beach every night looking for the tracks of turltes leaving the sea so that the eggs can be located.

While we were there we did find tracks but unfortunately a local had got there before us. We were however lucky enogh to see 3 sets of hatchlings coming up from the sand and we helped release them into the wild.
For the duration of the stay we stayed with a typical family of the region. Quite an eye opener. Cooking using an open fire and pigs running round the kitchen. I decided to sleep in a hammock the first night because of the heat and got some fright when a big sow woke me up sniffing around me. Probably thought my soring was some kind of mating call what? There are a lot of pigs in la barronna but as one of the volunteers explained a pig is like a savings account in Guatemala. There is the initial investment then regular investments (feeding) until such a time as the pig and the investment matures for a healthy profit.
The father of the family also took us into the magroves in traditional boats used for fishing. Was very cool, nearly calfed lifting the boat over sand bars mind you but was worth it.