Settling into My New Home

I settled into my room which I shared with four other people. I took the only available bunk, apparently, the reason my particular bunk was available was because it was broken. There was one board that was higher than the rest. The woman on the bunk below me, Rhonda, warned me about the boards on my bed. They had a tendency to fall through in the middle of night and hit her in the face causing the person on top to fall on the person on the bottom. All I thought about my first night was "don't fall, don't fall, don't fall."


Waking up in a new place was a welcome change. I didn't recognize a single voice I heard just outside my room, but they all sounded happy. I guess that's the thing about volunteers, they are all really happy to be where they are.

I joined the new faces at the big table which seems to be where everything important happened, food and meetings. We were informed that the leader of our group, Roy, would be leaving and his return date was unknown. Most of us were pretty surprised, but Roy didn't seem to be concerned about leaving 24 volunteers under the care of Roberto who seemed like the least friendly of everyone. He was a Tico (Costa Rican) who understood English, but hated speaking it because of his accent. He liked to pick-up phrases and swear words from the other volunteers so he would randomly spit out a phrase in English or German. He of course, grew on me, and became one of my favorite people to be around.

Amy and Nick, the veteran couple from Boston, fell into the leadership role quickly. They had been there for over a month by the time I got there. Amy was a first grade teacher back in "real life," so she enjoyed writing the daily chores on the whiteboard. Even more than writing on the board, she loved to clean it or to have it clean. That board must have been 5 or 6 years old, weathering rain and sun, but Amy had it cleaner than the day it was purchased, I'm sure. Nick was a dog trainer which surprisingly came in handy. We had at least one dog, Violetta, around us at all times, and she listened to Nick. Amy and Nick held meetings every morning where we decided what to do during the day.

Just after breakfast every day, we would brainstorm and try to figure out what needed to be done. We did everything from pumping two different kinds of water every day (drinking and non-drinking) to "trimming the trees off the path," which translated to "take this machete and hack away" to sweeping the dirt off the rocks around the table and cleaning the pavement we had around kitchen area. Other days where we got to use paint, build a hang out area and clean up the beach. Two of the volunteers from The Netherlands, Mari and Bart, built a chair out of drift wood.

Every day we had different work, but our schedule never changed. Breakfast, meeting, manual labor, siesta (napping, reading, writing, swimming, tanning), lunch, more work, siesta or shower, dinner, hang out, and of course, someone was always on turtle duty. Some of us took surf lessons with Yerald throughout the day. He was the only one who could get us out of manual labor. He would say that he couldn't control the waves, and when they were good, we had to go.