The New Year's news on El Sendero Ecológico El Aprisco!

It's been a few months, and recounting events and reflections thereof may prove daunting, both for me to write and for you to read! But it's been a good winter; the long cold is over, and it's almost back to the (slightly) warmer rainy season.
This winter (which is called summer here, simply because it doesn't rain. Guatemala is still in the northern hemisphere, so technically winter and summer occur at the same time as ours do. People here just use different criteria to label their seasons, haha) has been busy. It has also brought big changes in the park! Last December we received the news that neither the park director nor my counterpart (the education coordinator) would be continuing with us in 2010. My initial reaction was a mixture of relief (they were both rather ineffective at their jobs and seemed to be holding the park back) and alarm (their departure was to leave me with the other trail guide and the two park guards - me, running El Aprisco with no budget and almost no staff??? The last time the park lost a director it took over 3 months to find a replacement!). But I didn't have long to fear. Our parent association took swift action and hired an incredibly competent person who was until this promotion already among the association's administrative team, and who a few years ago had done undergrad thesis work in the park getting a degree in pedagogy. And did I mention she's a woman???
I met Vicky when Kate, the former volunteer, was still here and introduced us. Since then, it always felt comfortable dropping in on Vicky in her office to talk about El Aprisco, our projects there, ideas, failures, frustrations, dreams... she was a source of both inspiration and counsel. Now, she is my new boss.
Having a year under my belt in El Aprisco, Vicky looks to me for judgment calls, new ideas, and technical information on potential projects. She has earned my profound admiration for taking on the challenge of a park left in severe budget deficit thanks to the former director's incompetence and lack of consideration for the park's future once he decided he was quitting. She has taken that reality and transformed it, having already earned us two major grants and going for a third, all in this year's first trimester. This is big news for a little nature preserve dedicated to environmental education - not exactly a lucrative sector of the economy, you might say.
But our environmental education component is not the only one we're trying to grow this year. Our other major attraction can be seen flittering among the pine trees all hours of the day, and makes us a major destination for international visitors with a certain agenda in mind: birders. One of (if not THE) only natural preserve areas open to the public in the highland coniferous forest of Totonicapán, El Aprisco is home to a surprising biodiversity of highland bird species - around 95-100 different species, and about 30 of them endemic, meaning worldwide they are only found in these highland parts of Guatemala. On a birding experience while visiting Uncle Den in Mexico for New Year's I realized what a lucrative operation the excursion seemed to be catering to birders out to see the coastal bird species, and that there should also be interest in and demand for the birds you only find in the mountains! El Aprisco is perfect for birders who want the other side of the coin to the low-altitude tropical-forest species, and it seems that somehow other foreigners have suddenly come to the same conclusion: our birding program has experienced surprising growth in these last 3 months, having received about six groups of international visitors coming solely to see the birds in our forests. Better yet, we've created some community involvement and income generation from this new development, through the hiring of local youth guides from a neighboring family-owned parcel of forest to take our visitors deep into their (considerably larger and more habitat-diverse) forest in order to see a wider variety of highland bird species. It's rewarding watching these young people renewing their interest in their grandparents' knowledge of and intimacy with the forest and its avian inhabitants. This project has become one of generating income, developing youth leadership, and relearning cultural value of the environment. Such exciting stuff!!
To those who have not one iota of interest in birds, this probably all sounds like some mania that makes no sense. And I must admit I didn't used to get excited about birds. But these days on my walks through the forest to arrive at the El Aprisco front gate in the morning, I no longer just hear nature background noise. I hear instead the individual and distinct voices of the birds like they were my familiar neighbors, little personalities I can identify calling to me from up ahead eleven-o'clock according to the face of the clock, from two-o'clock understory level, from seven-o'clock but really distant... like characters in a story. Walks through the El Aprisco forest with school groups are enriched when I can stop in my tracks, tell the kids to listen hard, and act like it's a REALLY big deal what we're listening for... and then watch them get excited about birds when they learn even a little bit about them.
In the end, though, my Peace Corps service is not really about getting kids to learn bird species. Teaching them this stuff is about the excitement they start feeling for being in the woods and knowing something about it. It's about the realizations they come to about the way changes in their society and culture are using up and harming something so beautiful, and that it doesn't have to be that way. It's about showing the youth group members that young people CAN earn more of an income from protecting and sustainably using the environment - being a wilderness guide - than from overexploiting it extracting unbelievable amounts of illegally harvested wood, which is the career path many young people feel is the only one available to them in Toto. Wish me luck. And much luck and blessings to you too as we enter the Easter season. Happy Easter, till next time!