Serra Malagueta

Had our first day of On-the-Job Training and I am sooooo excited to start working!! I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think that as an environmental volunteer I’m going to get a pretty sick hook-up. Most of the EE volunteers are working in National Parks – there is talk of Sao Vicente, Santo Antao, Boa Vista and Sal. I’m trying not to think about it too much because I don’t want to create any expectations for myself, but its really hard to not speculate. The anticipation is killing me!!

So for our training we went to the park on Santiago, Serra Malagueta, and visited with the 2 current PCers working there. The park is so green and mountainous and beautiful. We talked briefly with the eco-tourism dept there and learned a bit about some of the activities they do at the park and how business goes. They average a little less than 500 foreign visitors a year. That’s less than 2 per day. Not so great. But there are multiple entrances to the park and it seems highly plausible that there are more people coming and going, they just aren’t going to the visitor’s center/paying. I was interested to learn that people actually live in the parks – there is even an elementary school there. The park controls their water usage and dictates how they can use the land; however, many of the park residents are employed by the park/sell their products through the park so it sounds like they are okay with the trade-offs. We met some women who are hired to remove invasive plant species. They get paid 300$00 a day. That is less than $4 USD... The EE who works at the park’s main job is working in the nursery growing endemic plant species that he eventually transplants throughout the park. There are several village women who work in the nursery with him and they also get space in the nursery to grow plants for their own personal use/to sell. It seemed like the park was doing a pretty decent job with encouraging community involvement and keeping the money within the community. However, their lack of paying visitors seems to be a major hindrance.

Anyways, we basically got to hike around the park today. It was awesome. Then we had lunch at the park cantina – rice, French fries and octopus. The octopus was pretty good (although I kept thinking about that World Cup octopus). Tasted kind of like calamari. They whole day just felt like I was on vacation. I could definitely get used a job like that.