Camping, and Batman, and turtles...oh my

I’ve heard former El Salvador PCVs somewhat sheepishly describe their service as a “2 year vacation”. While I don’t think that perfectly describes my service thus far, I do understand why people say that. While in general I’d say volunteers down here work really hard, we also play really hard. What’s more, we are “playing” in pretty cool, unique places.

October has been a very busy month. We started off with a Morazán GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) camp. Each volunteer in the area brought 3 teenage girls up to a hotel in northern Morazán and we had a 3 day camp filled with HIV education activities, leadership and gender role lectures and games, and some self-expression crafts. I brought 3 girls from my school, and then my host sister Lucia also came as a counterpart to teach a jelly-making course to the girls. It was a really great camp, everything ran smoothly, and the girls had a lot of fun (as did the volunteers, for the most part).

Last week I left my site again to head out west to Ataco (again) for a training for security wardens. Each region of the country has PCV security wardens who have special training in case of any sort of emergency (from civil unrest to an earthquake to a volcano erupting). I got trained along with 3 other PCVs, including Kara who celebrated her birthday during the training. Immediately from Ataco, we headed to the beach with a bunch of other PCVs to celebrate Halloween a little early and do some cool stuff.

volunteers and campers

 Friday afternoon we headed down to Playa Tunco, which is one of the best surfing beaches in the world and also the only real beach destination for tourists and backpackers. Tunco is great because it’s really one of the only places in El Salvador with tourist infrastructure. They have a café that has iced coffee (a rarity here), a wok restaurant; tons of cheap seafood restaurants, and waterfront bars that are open late and have live music and dancing. We spent Friday night in Tunco enjoying all that it has to offer, then the next day headed a few kilometers down the coast to Playa San Diego. Saturday we spent at Playa San Diego and had our volunteer Halloween costume party. It was a little odd having a costume party with about 12 PCVs in a rental house, but everyone dressed up and got in the Halloween spirit and it was a lot of fun. I dressed as Bane from the newest Batman movie. Jamie was Batman and Kara was Catwoman, so we were pretty well coordinated.

batman and bane

 Sunday night we did one of the coolest things ever…we released baby sea turtles!! There is an ex-PCV down here that works with a Salvadoran NGO for the protection of wildlife. Through her, we coordinated an “excursion” to walk on the beach at night and observe adult sea turtles come lay their eggs, and then later in the night to release recently hatched baby sea turtles into the ocean. This is a pretty popular tourist activity, although usually it takes place during the day. When people release baby sea turtles during the day, they are essentially sacrificing those sea turtles, because in the daylight the babies are extremely vulnerable to all sorts of ocean predators who are almost sure to snap them up. As it is, only 1 in every 1000 baby sea turtles that is released into the ocean will survive due to various threats on their lives. Therefore, when we got in contact with the NGO about doing this activity, they suggested that we do it at night – both to increase our babies’ chances of survival, but also to allow us the opportunity to see the mother turtles emerge from the ocean and lay their eggs (which they only do at night).

The whole experience was very cool. The first part of the night we wandered up and down the beach, keeping a lookout for mother turtles emerging from the ocean. We got to see 2 lay their eggs. First, they would crawl out of the ocean, moving surprisingly rapidly for a 100-pound creature that essentially resembles a giant boulder. The NGO workers would help the turtle situate herself comfortably in the sand and dig a hole. Then, the turtle would slip into what the NGO described as a “trance” period, which is when she would begin to lay her eggs. Sea turtles lay about 50 eggs in each session, and this specific type of turtle will lay 3 times every 2 years. After laying all of her eggs, the turtle shimmies, shakes, and pushes sand over the hole her eggs are in, then twists about and messes up all the sand to camouflage the area, in a movement I can best describe as an attempt at a 360-degree snow (or sand) angel. She then turns around and books it back down to the ocean. We couldn’t take pictures with flash or make much noise while observing the turtle lay her eggs, but while she was in her “trance” we could get very close to her and even got the chance to stroke her shell (which essentially feels like a coconut). While this whole adventure was very interesting, it does not surprise me after observing it that sea turtles are an endangered species. It took a team of about 4 workers to help the turtle get into an appropriate egg laying position, lay her eggs into an adequate hole, and then get back into the ocean. While I have no doubt that the turtles would have successfully laid their eggs with or without this assistance, the workers then collected the eggs and brought them back to the NGO office, where they are placed in special protected incubators so that they can hatch safely. Sea turtle eggs are a delicacy down here, and poachers collect all that they can find and sell them in the market, even though this activity is punishable by law.

mama sea turtle post egg laying

guarded turtle nests (under the sand, naturally)