#68

I had a realisation on my first night sleeping in the centre´s volunteer house that the jungle has sooo many more weird insects and creatures than anywhere we´ve been in South America so far. The girls I was sharing a room with recommended that I put up whatever mosquito nets I could find around the sides of my bottom bunk, and to also wear one while I slept. I thought this was slightly excessive until I woke up at 2am with a cockroach crawling on the mosquito net I had put along the edge of my bed. eeeeugh.

After a night spent worrying about scary insects, on my first day of real work at Los Monos I learnt the basic routine of volunteering there:
7AM: Wakeup
7.30AM: Animal feeding time - which essentially involved preparing bowls of food for the monkeys and other animals and delivering them to their cages. Different types of monkey needed the fruit chopped in different ways so this was a pretty complicated task and Irene, the slightly moody lady in charge of animal feeding, was insanely strict on chopping consistently sized chunks.
9AM: Breakfast for us - the rule is that nobody eats before the monkeys, so chopping amazing looking fruit all morning was hard. In Ecuadorian style, our breakfast consisted of rice with fried eggs. 
10AM-1PM: General work time - today this consisted of us shovelling saw dust into bags while Irene sat in the shade shouting things in Spanish at us. Afterwards we watched Jonathan, Irene´s brother who also worked at Los Monos, feed the snakes and move them to new glass enclosures. 
1PM-3PM: Collect the breakfast plates, chop a huge amount more fruit and deliver this to their cages again.
3PM: Lunchtime for us - more rice and some beans.
4PM: Collect the animal plates and clean the feeding areas.
5PM onwards was free time, during which we watched a film on Yvan´s projector and played cards until bedtime.