Sarah Hinshelwood/Old Gold & Black

This past week I had vacation days off from the school where I work because it was their mid-semester break. While I used part of it to chill and relax, I also participated in several other volunteering opportunities that Casa Nica is involved in. The first I worked on was building a garden fence for a local school. The garden was right beside the sports area, meaning that whenever a ball went wayward, often the plants got trampled upon, something they wanted to prevent as they use the garden for teaching purposes and to sell produce out of for the school. We spent about three hours working on that on Thursday. It was a chain link fence, which is super expensive here to buy, so we were using old chain link fencing that had just been dumped at the school. However, on Friday, I went to another volunteer opportunity at the Zoologico Nacional, or the National Zoo. I went with Elliot, one of the Casa Nica Program Directors, and with Oraya, another volunteer from Thailand.

Taking off the old fruit
Sarah Hinshelwood/Old Gold & Black

At the zoo, I got assigned to work in the Mariposario with Oraya (to help translate for her as she does not know a lot of Spanish). The Mariposario is the butterfly house at the zoo. It was a really cool experience. We helped take down all the old fruit from the day before and then replace the fruit with freshly cut fruit for the butterflies to eat. After that, we went and helped with the gusanos, or the caterpillars. They breed butterflies from eggs to full butterflies, so they have a room full of plants with larvae and caterpillars at all different stages of the process. My job was to clean the boxes they are kept in and lay new paper in the bottom of them to keep the caterpillar poop off the bottom. The other task I got to help with was transferring the caterpillars from old, eaten plants to new fresh plants so that they would have more to eat and not starve. 

Oraya with a butterfly!
Sarah Hinshelwood/Old Gold & Black

The zoo has several different types of butterflies, but the most common one they have are buhos, or owl butterflies. They also had monarch butterflies, which were gorgeous. they also had some butterflies that were black and yellow striped as well as butterflies with light blue wings. The enclosed butterfly habitat was fun to work in because often the longer you’re there, the more butterflies come and land on you, especially if you put some juice from the fruit on your skin. At one point I had about seven butterflies on me as I was working. After working though, I got to go around the rest of the zoo and look at what they had. They had lions, tigers, pumas, leopards, tapirs, emus, monkeys, turtles, sheep, and all sorts of other animals. It was a fun time and a great way to get to see the National Zoo.