Rurrenabaque, Bolivia

E.J. here again.

A day after Melissa departed, we started to make our way toward Bolivia. We took a bus to the border town of Puno, Peru, on Lake Titicaca and spent a day there researching how to go about getting a Bolivian visa. We were told in the bus station that there was a Bolivian Consulate in town and got there just as they were closing. A very kind Bolivian diplomat sat down with us and went over our documents and helped us get everything together to get a Bolivian visa, approved our documents and issued the visa. We needed passport photos, copies of our passports, bank statements, copies of flights returning to our countries and documentation of address of where we planned to stay in-country. And THEN we had to pay $160 a piece for the visas. This is what they call reciprocity: they make it a pain in the ass for Americans to get a Bolivian visa as a tit-for-tat because the US government is VERY stingy giving Bolivians visas.

The next day we took a bus and spent a day on the Bolivian side of lake Titicaca, in Copacabana, a rather unimpressive pass-through town with decent food, before moving on to La Paz. I should note, if you ever pass through Copacabana, we had one of our best meals in some time at a place on Avenida 6 de Agosto, called Maura’z.

Lake Titicaca

We took a bus the next day to La Paz, Bolivia’s largest city, which included an interlude ferry ride across Lake Titicaca, where we disembarked the bus, got on boats, were ferried across, while the bus drove onto a barge, which brought it in turn across.

We spent a night in La Paz and flew out the next morning for Rurrenabaque, a town to the north, nestled in the Bolivian Amazon basin rainforest. We had a workaway lined up for us outside of “Rurre” as it is called, 20 minutes up the Beni river, which ultimately flows into the Amazon. We had been contemplating a rainforest experience since Ecuador and this was finally it.

We spent what was (for me) one of the most memorable weeks of the trip at an animal rescue center on 50 hectares of land abutting the Madidi Nature Reserve.

Rio Beni, Rurrenabaque, Bolivia

Drucilla, the squirrel monkey

One of the living spaces at ONCA with the traditional thatched roof

So many spiders

Lounge and Kitchen area at ONCA

Interior of the thatched roof

The rescue/ rehabilitation center is run by a Spanish NGO called ONCA (Organization for the Natives and Conservation of the Amazon). ONCA runs a center where they take in injured and rescued animals from the Bolivian government, which when we were there included one tortoise, two turtles native to the region, 9 capuchin monkeys and one squirrel monkey.

Max, another walking wounded, had tumors all over him, most of which had been removed.

There were also 5 dogs and two cats that had been taken in. The most endearing of which was a dog who arrived 6 months ago with hundreds of parasitic worms coming out of his head. The poor pup had been living wild in the rain forest (they think) and had one blind eye from glaucoma and had had half of his nose ripped off in a fight with some forest creature. They de-wormed the poor guy and made sure his nose injury wasn't infected and took him in. And named him Worms!

Worms, in all his glory.

Many of the monkeys were owned as pets and given up, abandoned or abused by their owners when they started acting like the wild animals that they are. Regular work included cleaning the monkey cages that they slept in at night, preparing their meals, clearing trails through the forest with machetes, planting coconut, pineapple and other fruit bearing trees and helping out one of the neighboring indigenous communities. 

One of the village houses that we helped construct

Twice a week we would go to the nearby village to help with reconstruction. About three years ago there was a flood that destroyed the village, so we would go and carry lumber, bags of sand, concrete and rocks from the river, up to the village. Another project we were involved in was clearing land for ONCA to plant a small papaya grove for the monkey food, so the site can become more self-sustaining. This included clearing the land with machetes, piling the dead wood toward the center of the area and burning it to replenish the soil before new trees could be planted. Brutal work in the heat and humidity of the rainforest.

Harvesting beans to help out the local indigenous community.

Controlled burn to plant a fruit grove

There were around 8-10 short-term volunteers, such as ourselves and 6 long-term volunteers, including a Catalonian veterinarian, who was working for free, so the other huge and daunting task was making 3 meals a day for everyone. Its amazing how much pasta or rice everyone can eat after hacking away with a machete all morning.

Drucilla helping Maggie brush her teeth

Drucilla helping Maggie drink her water

All in all, this was an incredibly rewarding project to get to contribute to. The founder of ONCA, Andres, had this infectious, charismatic vision and you couldn't help but want to be a part of their legacy. Carles, (not Carlos) the veterinarian, was doing amazing work helping these animals get healthy. In the time we were there, he had to do a reconstruction of the nose of one of the dogs, who got in a scrap with some forest creature (wild boars or a cousin of the mongoose, they guessed). The week before we arrived, he had to put stitches in the scalp of one of the capuchins, after it injured itself in a tree and had to operate on a dog with a prolapsed intestinal segment. And this was not some sterile, well-stocked veterinary hospital in the suburbs.  Carles was pretty amazing. One ongoing issue is treating the monkeys (and dogs and cats) for parasites. In the other rescue center where several folks had worked previously, they gave the monkeys injections of an anti-parasitic drug to kill intestinal worms, etc. Carles and Andres didn't want to have to traumatize the monkeys with shots, so they realized that they could take one of these gigantic grasshoppers that the monkeys liked to eat, inject the grasshopper with the anti-parasitic, and they give it to the monkey to eat. Kind of like dabbing a pill in peanut butter before I give it to my dog. Point being, at this rescue center, a lot of thought was put into helping the monkeys without traumatizing them.

Maggie helping Carles give one of the village dogs an anti-parasite injection.

Afternoon waterfall swim to cool off

The day we left, they were supposed to get 2-4 more monkeys brought in by the government, for which they were feverishly trying to construct new sleeping cages. 
After a mandatory quarantine period to assess for disease and parasites, the monkeys would join the community and could begin to get socialized. Most of these 'pet' monkeys had grown up from babies in essential isolation, so one factor of ONCA's project is simply to teach monkeys how to be monkeys. Besides not knowing how to interact with others, many didn't know how to interact with their environment, because they had lived their whole lives in cages. To keep them safe from predators, all the monkeys sleep in secure cages at night but in the morning, one of the (more qualified than me) volunteers would let them out and set their harnesses onto an elaborate system of cable runs in the forest, so they could get comfortable climbing and living in trees without being able to escape the center (if a monkey escaped into the forest without having been given approval for release by the gov't, ONCA would get in serious trouble). 

The thing that really hit me about halfway through the week was how sincere all the volunteers were about the well-being of the monkeys. It was a regular occurrence that someone would get bitten by one of the capuchins, but I never heard anyone complain or voice resentment. Everyone understood that this was part of working with the monkeys and came with the territory.

I can not overstate how incredible I think the work was that they are able to do on such a shoestring budget. I'm pretty cynical sometimes and its easy to doubt the authenticity of some overseas NGO. When you see Sally Struthers on TV begging for donations, its so hard to know how much of that money ever gets to where it goes to. A lot of NGOs have huge bureaucracies of administrators, whose paychecks take away from the money going to where its needed most. The same is true for a lot of American non-profits. When the Executive Director of Goodwill or Livestrong makes close to a million dollars, there's something wrong. The only paid employee of ONCA in Bolivia was Mario, a local Bolivian man who worked with the agency as a consultant, laborer and liaison to the indigenous community. Almost every dollar ONCA receives goes toward monkey food (bananas, pineapple, guava, papaya, etc) and veterinary supplies. I hate to make a hard sell, but every donation of $5, $10 or $20 would go a LONG way toward furthering their mission and improving the lives of these monkeys (and turtles).
If you'd like to donate, you can via paypal at this link here and hit "Make a Donation": http://oncaorg.org/0-3-02-asociate.html