When asked about my experience from the Haney Fellowship, I can only say it was indescribable. My Haney Fellowship allowed me to travel to Puerto Maldonado, Peru, where I lived in the Amazon Rainforest for two weeks. I stayed at Taricaya, an ecological reserve recognized by the government of Peru. Taricaya was responsible for giving the government annual records of populations in the reserve. It also rehabilitated animals to be, one day, returned to the wild. They were able to rescue turtles and clear trails of their reserve. But enough about what Taricaya could do; what did I do?

A typical day at Taricaya included the following: wake up at 5 a.m., first activity at 5:30, breakfast at 7, second activity at 9, lunch at 12, afternoon activity at 3:30, and dinner at 7. The jobs varied between trail clearing, animal feeding, butterflies, new farm platform (NFP) and canopy (bird watching), rescue center maintenance (RCM), new cage, fruits, seeds, and the turtle project.  Here are my brief anecdotes on each. Trail clearing: the machete quickly became my new favorite tool. Animal feeding: playing with monkeys and feeding jaguars whole chickens, unreal. Butterflies: butterfly net plus friendly wager equals extreme butterfly catching.  Bird Watching:  I'm no longer afraid of heights after that.  RCM: sewing nets, manual labor and cleaning, not a favorite activity.  New cage:  I built an animal's cage, like one at a zoo; incredible.  Fruits: gathering fruits from locals, and naturally eating every new fruit we found. Nothing beats a good jungle fruit.  Seeds:  looking for endangered trees of the trails and collecting their seeds for repopulation.  Now that you know what I did daily, I'd like to share a few stories.

The Turtle project was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, like many other things at Taricaya. The turtle project was implemented because the turtle population was decreasing, the result of  locals finding and selling the eggs at the market.  I left Taricaya at 4:30pm to take a boat down river to a small island with an expansive beach.  There we set up our tents, all five of us in two tents, and at around 6:00pm, we ate a pre-packed dinner.  We then went to sleep until 11pm, when we would take our first walk down the beach. On this walk we would use our flashlights to look for turtle tracks, coming out of the surf and going farther inland. If tracks were found, we followed them until we found the nest; we would then begin taking measurements.  We measured the temperature of the sand, the number of eggs, the width of the turtle's tracks, and the width and depth of the nest. The eggs were placed in a bucket padded with sand for safe transport. Once finished, we'd continue down the beach to find more nests. We would sleep again back at camp until 2:00am when we would repeat the process.  Back at Taricaya, the eggs found were placed in an artificial beach using the measurements recorded. 

Another good story was "the snake," when a six-foot-long bushmaster made its way into the main building at Taricaya. You may not know this, but a bushmaster's venom can kill a man in 20 minutes, and the nearest hospital to Taricaya was an hour-and-a-half away. This posed a serious safety issue. And so after swift deliberation, the staff went in. There was Daniel, the herpetologist, with a special reptile-handling pole, Gigo and Cynthia with machetes, Oscar with his crudely made spear, and Melvin with a shotgun. After a few feminine screams from Gigo, "the snake" was taken care of.

The opportunities I received at Taricaya because of the Haney Fellowship are amazing, and for that opportunity I am forever grateful. What other eighteen-year-old can say that he or she lived in the Amazon Rainforest, swam with piranhas, fed jaguars, and saved baby turtles. I am still in contact with the people I met there, including two boys from Canada, a girl from Wisconsin, a girl from Washington, and even a chemistry teacher from England. For this experience as a whole, I cannot thank the Haney family enough.