Ron has been getting up early in the mornings slightly before sunrise to take advantage of the cool morning hours and the beautiful twilight. Unlike in the evenings the mosquitos seem to be less aggressive towards him in the morning. All pictures in this blog have been taken by him. He doesn’t leave the house without his photo camera and is upset the moment a bird, frog, spider, or butterfly passes him by when he does not have the camera with him. Like the other morning when a skunk walked by… I have never seen one here only smelt them.

The heat is starting to get to us. We reached 40°C on Wednesday, of course the only day of the week where I had appointments scheduled in the nearby towns of Libertad and San José to get proper internet connection, a bank account, and my new ID card. We were literally melting away in the stores that did not have air conditioning and then experienced some gigantic and magnificent storms as you can witness from the photo below. San José is the capital of the department our farm is in. It’s also called little Montevideo and has some really nice old architecture around the main square. It also has a theatre. Let’s see if we get to go to a show there – right now it is off season as it is summer. At the telephone company’s shop (Antel, is a state own company and has monopoly over land lines) I encountered three shop attendants who were all extremely professional, helpful, and friendly. Getting internet to the farmhouse, which is relatively remote, is actually quite tricky. They have to first find you on a map and do this best not only by GIS mapping but also by locating neighbours that still have a functioning land line. Amazingly one of the ladies in the shop had been working for Antel for almost 40 years and has evolved with all the technological revolutions this company has undergone. When she started her job the telephone agents still physically plugged you in and out of the lines. They could listen into the conversations and knew who was where when. She actually remembered some of the phone numbers of our neighbours 😊

Other than that, we have mostly still been cleaning. Even though we get up in the early morning hours, the days tend to disappear in time. By the end of the day, we sometimes wonder what has happened to time. I love the feeling of time density being slightly off. Like when one is on vacation and the days seem endless and short at the same time. We have only arrived 11 days ago, but it feels like forever already. In this place, where time seems to have stopped, we removed many things that have been forgotten here, bottles, broken brooms, mouldy shower curtains, and cracked toys. In all the cleaning and sorting memories come up – an old ashtray that reminds of my grandmother (who didn’t smoke but had it on the sofa for guests), the water pump that provides pressure to the house but is currently not working that my father installed back in the day and he was so proud of, the soap bits that my mother puts in the closest to make the clothes smell good. And endless amounts of toys that belonged to Noah when he was little. Building blocks that he never played with (but I loved to play with), his spiderman gear that could shoot webs, the big pirate boat that one of my school friends gave to him on one of our trips to Munich and which we got back to Uruguay in a suitcase (don’t ask me how we did that…).  I also rediscovered my collection of birds nests, giant moths, spiders, feathers, and river snail shells.

I am very proud of Ron. He had decided to quit smoking here on the farm and after the pack of tobacco was empty (he smoked the last cigarettes using newspaper as he had run out of cigarette papers), he quit. His withdrawal symptoms are ok, mostly he is eating a lot all the time… His sense of temperature is also slightly off, with prominent night sweats and some shivering during the day. But overall, his mood is only slightly impaired, and I haven’t had to send him into the woods permanently yet. I have sent him there temporarily though, to set up the wildlife cameras we had brought with us from Germany.

We purchased these through the generous donations we received through the gofundme I had set up (thank you to my family, friends, and colleagues who have donated so far). We are happy to receive further donations to be able to set up the trails in my nearby forest to allow school children and locals to appreciate the wildlife and habitats they have here. Protected areas in Uruguay, which only make up around 1% of the country, are mostly private land and not accessible to the public. This makes it hard for the population to value their resources and to fight for the preservation and expansion of protected areas. By opening parts of it up to the public and offering dedicated educational programs to school children my vision is to establish a sense of ownership in this cohort and community.

Our harvest of the first week of wildlife cameras mostly include foxes (picture on the right) (most likely zorro de monte/ crab-eating fox Cerdocyon thous rather than zorro gris/pampas fox Lycalopex gymnocercus). We also got to see an armadillo (picture on the left; too far away to distinguish the species), a pigeon, a black house cat, and cows. Let’s see what next week may bring!