Well, it’s afternoon in the cloudforest, which means the clouds have rolled in and the rain is coming down. Today’s rain is pretty heavy, a good sign for planting. If it’s going to keep up like this for a few more days, then we can start planting tomorrow. Victor, one of the workers, grows the trees from seed or from cuttings (estacas, literally stakes) in our vivero. He told me that he spends his afternoons after work (which is already some serious physical labor) climbing through the undergrowth looking for seeds or good cuttings to take. Talk about garden commitment.
Today was my first day being manager. Tom left in the early hours to get his bus; he’ll be flying into the States and then Canada, and will be away for two whole months. Two months that felt like not much at all when I agreed to come down, and which now seem monumentally huge.
I woke up at 5 and lay awake until my alarm went off a half hour later. By then it’s already light out. I couldn’t eat breakfast for nervousness, and with my stomach in my throat I went up to meet the workers at 6am.
And I survived! I introduced myself, explained who I am and what I’ll be doing here, asked them to show me what they’ve been working on and how much longer their projects will take them, so as to get a sense of when I should ask them to start on some of the other projects Tom & I lined up. Some of them remember me from last year. Jason tried to remind Alonso, telling him that I was here when they built the cabinas... and indeed I was! But Alonso shook his head and insisted that although I look familiar, he couldn’t remember me being there when they built the cabinas.
They got to work, and I went to get the volunteers started for the day. There are two GVI volunteers, Kyle and Max (GVI being the organization that I worked for last year and which brought me to Cloudbridge in the first place)! They will be working on biodiversity surveys, focusing especially on birds. Then there’s a couple that’s travelling through Central and South America this year, Matt and Sama, who will be working on doing some local watershed studies, as well as measuring carbon on one of the old-growth plots. They will be here for the next 4 months, and the GVI crew for the next 3 months - so those are the ones who will be here with me for my whole time.
The shorter-term volunteers are here for another month or two months (as yet undecided). They don’t have specific research projects, so are mostly helping with anything and everything. They’ve been helping to spread cartón around newly planted trees on Sendero Montaña, which is the most effective way of suppressing weeds, and will be planting more trees early next week. They have identified a construction project down by the volunteer house, which they’ll be working on for the next week or two, and one of them will be trying to germinate some fig cuttings using root hormone. So, a lot of projects going on.
I took the GVI guys out for a hike to introduce them to a few more trails, while the others started out on their various projects. It was a good morning with some hard hiking (is there a single easy hike in Cloudbridge?), and when I came back I found the workers going strong, and the volunteers who had returned from their cartón-laying inspecting the framework on the welcome center and seeing how best to fix the bust door. So day one of managing is out of the way. Makes me feel like perhaps this all is a doable feat.
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