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Jenny Crick writes

...about her experience while volunteering in Ecuador.

Hey there, I've finally hit civilisation again (back in Quito) and have found fairly reliable internet access. The computer in the nearest town to the reserve was crap, it took me 40 mins just to get a connection and send 1 email to the parents before the computer crashed for the third time, that's when I thought ¨sod it¨ and went to the beach! That's why my diary on the web site is non exsistant.

The last month has been so amazing, I've loved every minute and have rarely stopped laughing, there were 5 volunteers, me and Andrew from England, 1 Australian, who cracked me up, he was so funny, 1 American, who was having a tough time on Lariam and was a bit untalkative as it made him paranoid, but he was still cool and 1 other girl who was from Scotland.

The work was a bit like what I did as a job back in England, so it will add to my CV when I'm trying to find a job in a years time. We did a lot of vegetation clearance with machetes. I managed to embed a machete into my hand, one minute I had machete in one hand, a stick in the other, then I had one bloody hand and a bloody machete, not sure how it happened! I'm hoping I'll still have the scar in a years time, if not I took a photo for posterity.

I saw snakes, loads of birds, fruitbats, got covered in tics, sandfly bites and mosquitoes bites. Though after a month of trying out lots of bites, I've decided that mosquitoes are 1 of the least annoying, in order it must go, red ants, sandflies, then mosquitoes. Tics are just annoying as there's loads of them and they get everywhere, I picked 1 off my bum cheek. We had intensive tic checks once we finished work. Gaffer tape is good to pluck them off and we've tried lots of variations of tic disposal.

The food was fantasic, we harvested all our fruit from the jungle and out here everything we do with potatoes they do with green bananas, I´m green banana-ed out.

Although we were there to work it was so relaxed, our field worker Vicente spoke little English but we started to get to know the word "recesso" fairly early on, sometimes "recesso" took 30minutes and was taken on the beach. Questions were asked in pigeon Spanish, pigeon English and gesticulations. My Spanish is getting better but I know the words for bucket, hammer, barb wire, things I'm not sure when I'm going to use again. Though I might try and do another volunteer project in either Bolivia or Argentina.

My plan is nw to make my way to Cuenca in the south of the country during this week sometime, I've got a month to leave Ecuador before my visa runs out.