by LUCY JOHNSON, KYLE MAYOR
Special to the Hays Free Press
This past October I had the privilege of spending two weeks volunteering at a panda preserve in Sichuan Provence, China. I was part of a team of 11 multinational volunteers organized by Earthwatch, a nonprofit group that seeks to engage people in scientific field research and education across the planet.
Aware that this is certainly not most people’s idea of the average vacation, the Hays Free Press invited me to share some of my experience with their readers. I have come to find that these trips offer travelers glimpses of life in other countries that many organized tours and tourist destinations often miss.
For me, there are also huge benefits in feeling useful during my vacations. I find it so much easier, ironically, to completely relax on vacation if I’m given a new job to distract me from thinking about the one back home. I suppose I’m rather like one of those grandmothers who insist on cooking, cleaning, decorating and making a run to the grocery store when she comes to visit for Christmas.
During a typical day on my trip, I would wake up at 7:30 a.m. and eat a hearty Chinese breakfast of coffee, eggs, cold noodles, steamed buns, toast, rice and cabbage. An hour later it was off to the panda preserve, where I would clean dirty panda stalls and help the caretakers feed the pandas their own breakfast: bamboo, apples and sweet cakes.
We volunteers would have lunch in the staff cafeteria, where the cooks were always happy to give everyone huge helpings of their Sichuan stir-fry. In the afternoon we often received a short lecture from local panda researchers, detailing the purposes of their research.
Afterwards, volunteers would be paired off and assigned pandas. For up to two hours, we would record panda behavior, using detailed time sheets developed by the local researchers and their students. Occasionally, we’d even wear panda suits while recording our observations to avoid disturbing the wilder pandas.
By 4:30 p.m. our workday was done, and myself and the other volunteers were free to catch up on email and news before heading out to dinner by 6 p.m. Dinner was, every single day without fail, a feast far too big to finish. Eight, nine, even 10 dishes would be prepared along with gallon-sized buckets of rice for each table. Tea, beer and local wine were also provided (occasionally in dangerous quantities). It was always a challenge to make it to 9 p.m. without falling asleep.
By the end of the trip, I gained five pounds, a dozen friends and an incurable love of pandas! If you or someone you know is interested in a similar adventure, please check out www.earthwatch.org for more information.
