I survived our Field Based Training. We had a jam packed schedule every day from 7 am until 8 or 9 at night. Our Tech Trainer has lost his mind! But we were staying in the rustic little village outside of Coban.. but you would never know you were so close to ´civilization.´ The highlight of the trip for me was our attempt at birdwatching on Friday morning. Breakfast was scheduled for 5:45 am, and optimistically, starting birdwatching shortly thereafter. The birdwatching trail was up and over this crazy dirt road down into this huge sinkhole where the village of sanimteka is located. They loaded all 20-something of us into the backs of these early 80´s era toyota pickups... the preferred form of transport in the back roads in guate... and up up up and then down down down we went. i love every minute of it. I´ll try to post some pics later in the week. Anyways, by the time we actually made it to the birdwatching trail, it was after 9 am.... you can probably guess how many birds we saw. Nonetheless the trail took us through this incredible cloud forest that was so lush and green. It was beautiful. I took to watching the ground instead of the trees, on the lookout for crawly critters. I found a tiny frog and a tiny anole lizard. no jumping pit vipers..yet. the volunteer there was a bit of herp enthusiast too and was giving us the skinny on the snakes, lizards, etc in the area.
One thing that was really impressed upon me this week was how genuine and welcoming the people of the village were where we stayed. I´ve been hearing about how wonderful the guatemalan people are, and this week that really hit home with me. We were officially welcomed by the entire ´junta directiva´of the town, and by the way were the first overnight guests the community has hosted. I was touched by their heartfelt welcome. I was sad to leave on saturday morning, only comforted by the fact that one of us will be back for good, and i´ll at least have a chance to go back to visit.