Sloth!

Sloths

So we’ve been back at the training facility for the last week – and it is our last week here. Shortly we go back to our host families for a week and then we move into the city for two weeks or so in the ramp up to swearing in as official volunteers. We have more technical trainings, more language, more culture. It’s good to see everybody and to also get deeper into things – we are past most of the self reflection and introductory stuff now, which is good.

But we have also had some awesome adventures at the training camp. We are sort of on the fringes of a suburb about 45 minutes outside the city – so it isn’t exactly rural, but there are chunks of trees that look pretty jungle-y very close by. So that means there is a fair amount of flora and fauna hanging around. I haven’t had any trouble – besides two toads and a lizard jumping on me on three separate occasions (I made very manly noises, lemme tell you) – but two girls have been bitten by cockroaches. One of those girls was also pooped on by a cockroach, but that was in her village not here. No one else has had any trouble with cockroaches, so I think those girls need to evaluate their soap choices or something.

Anyway, we had a presentation from a local naturalist on various creepies and crawlies we might meet in the jungle – exciting stuff, look up the Brazilian Wandering Spider (or Banana Spider) sometime – and because he lives nearby he sometimes stops by to show us things that he bumped into in his/our backyard. For example, he stopped by with a horned beetle the size of my hand the other day. A bit before that, he came by with an adolescent boa constrictor – only about 2 meters long.

While he was here and we were petting the snake (it was in a tree near his house and he snagged it so someone wouldn’t kill it) someone noticed something moving in the low shrubs on the other side of the cinderblock wall (turned so that you can see through the openings, not solid) that separates our training facility from the construction company next door. It was an adult male sloth! He wasn’t very big, but his claws were and they just look like aliens! Their faces are so weird and the way they hold their heads is just…off. Also, their whole mode of motion just doesn’t feel quite right.

Anyway, the construction company has dogs that roam about and so the naturalist was worried that they would kill the sloth. No one was there, so this meant that several of us, the naturalist included were climbing/leaning over the wall trying to persuade the sloth to grab a broom handle and come to our side of the wall. Sloths are endangered and this one was evidently confused. Like I said, we aren’t far from the jungle we aren’t exactly close. The guy said that it likely wandered away from it’s normal zone while looking for a good place to poop (it’s what he said) and then got confused and probably crossed a couple roads.

We finally managed to get the sloth to grab hold and we brought it to our side of the wall. The naturalist has a friend that rescues slothes but, unfortunately, she is out of the country for a few weeks. So we picked it up (using the broom handles – you don’t want it to grab you directly with those claws) and walked down the road with it hanging between us like a….well a sloth! We found a decent patch of jungle-y woods, put it in a tree, and called it our good deed of the day. How’s that for jungle living? Amazing.