“How many kids can you fit in the truck?”
“Well, there are belts for three…”
“Don’t worry about belts. You five, go with Forest!”
So began my first day volunteering at the Troncones primary school’s first-ever summer camp. With the kids in the truck and the fuel gauge resting on empty, we drove through Troncones and onto the rutted dirt road that leads to la Boca de la Lagunilla, where the plan was to go kayaking and learn about the life of the lagoon from Alejandro, who runs a local ecotourism outfit.
Before jumping into the kayaks, Alejandro gave a brief talk on how the lagoon was fed by rains and how it provided a sanctuary for many of the coastal species that were valuable both as food sources and as components of a biosphere that draws paying tourists to the area. As one might expect for kids of their ages, they only half paid attention to the talk, their focus captured more by the kayaks, giant toys that most of them had never played in before. I jumped in the back seat of an open-topped kayak with two kids in the front.
If they were bored by the lesson, they certainly enjoyed seeing the animals. The lagoon was stuffed with wildlife. Green iguanas climbed mangle branches, brown pelicans perched in palm trees, frogs poked their eyes above the water and great blue herons peered at us through tall grass, all trying to gauge our intent as we paddled past them. The kids shouted at each new sighting. After a light lunch, we loaded up the trucks and retraced our path down the dirt road and back to the Troncones primary school.
The primary school in Troncones covers grades 1-6 and consists of a handful of low-ceilinged, single-story cement buildings, a covered cement basketball court and a dusty soccer field. It also has a toilet, in the sense that if you need to use a toilet, there is a space designated for the necessary functions. This space contains a bucket and has no running water, a problem that has persisted for some time, despite past donations made to correct it. Troncones has no secondary school, so any kids who do go onto secondary education must travel to a neighboring town. Unfortunately, this means that for many of them, their education stops at the 6th grade.
The driving force behind the summer camp came in the form of Nancy Villavicencio, who recruited a motley mix of tourists, expats and local parents to volunteer as instructors and chaperones. The week prior to the camp, she called us together for a planning session at her place.
Besides the expected local parents of primary school children, there was Camille, a tourist who had been volunteering at the school for a while as part of her agreement with HelpStay; Eva and her son, tourists from Vancouver, who just happened to be in town at the time; me, in a similar but more long-term situation as Eva; Pablo and Nicolás, two twenty-somethings from Mexico City traveling the country in a VW bus and several American yoga instructors from a local spa. When you’re short on teachers, toilets and funds, this is how you get a summer camp up and running.
Day 2
On my second day volunteering at the camp, I gave a quick lesson on the biology of mangroves and took the kids on a field trip to the local mangrove, where among other animals, we hoped to catch sight of the shy resident crocodiles.
Along the way, Juan Carlos, a local conservationist who runs a small sea turtle sanctuary, talked to the kids about the value of mangroves in terms the kids could easily understand. How many of you have parents who work in tourism, he asked. Nearly every hand went up. Juan Carlos then explained that tourists came to this stretch of beach specifically because of its natural beauty and biodiversity. Tourists rent hotel rooms and dine at the restaurants where many of the children’s parents work (the hotel rentals make for a mixed argument, as nearly all hotels here are foreign-owned). They book tours with local tour operators like Alejandro, take surf lessons from local schools and make donations to causes that struggle to find local help, such as the sea turtle sanctuaries that dot the coast.
It’s not easy holding young kids’ attention. Juan Carlos’s seemingly simple argument was soon drowned out in cries of delight at seeing mangrove branches covered with large green iguanas.
One girl commented that iguanas were her favorite food.
Fortunately, we were armed with more than arguments for this field trip. As a lesson in field biology, I had given the kids pads of graph paper with places to mark how many of various kinds of animals they could count in the mangrove. Count everything you see, I told them, and we’ll compare counts between groups at the end.
I might not be a child expert, but I know something about the value of competitive games. Really, the whole point of the exercise was just to encourage the kids to be aware of all the animals in their surroundings. In this, Juan Carlos and I weren’t disappointed.
On my last day volunteering, we took the kids surfing in the whitewater along the Troncones beachfront. Despite living so close to the beach, few locals go there except to fish. Most of the kids said that they rarely ever spent time there. Only a couple could swim and most expressed concern at getting in the water. Happily, they overcame their fears and let us push them up onto waves. It didn’t take long for the water to be overwhelmed by their screams of delight.
