split personality

Obsessive-compulsive Urbanite Goes to the Jungle

I stepped off the volunteer bus, took tired strides toward the dining hut, and THWACK! Big, nasty bug in the eye. It was huge, not your average garden variety fungus gnat. And I have eyeball phobia—I’m afraid of mine and yours. My hands flew up to my face and I blindly asked whoever-was-there-no-one-in-particular where the bathroom was.

It’s difficult to get that clean feeling from an icy cold trickle, roughly the diameter of a spaghetti noodle, and a bar of natural soap that until your unsuspecting hand came upon it, served as an overstuffed sofa for a squishy little lump of baby lizard. Baaadd neeewws, I reflected, I’ll just dry my hands on this old pink towel, carefully avoid the sleeping towel frogs nestled in the folds, and make haste for my hand sanitizer.

Now, I realize that facing the prospect of not being able to wash one’s hands for the next ten days may not induce the same hyper-neurotic, paralytic dementia in everyone. It just so happens that if I were asked to describe what I thought hell was like, I would answer that hell is having perpetually dirty hands combined with an eternity of inadequate water pressure.


Passionate Naturalist in the Jungle

I stepped off the volunteer bus, smelled the rainforest smell and, strolling gleefully toward the dining hut, got my first close up view of Machimus cingulatus. It was enormous, much larger than the average garden fly. After carefully handling the beautiful insect, I went to wash my hands before indulging in the fresh yucca chips and homemade salsa set out on the table.

It can hardly be called “roughing it” in the jungle if there is a sink with running water just a few steps outside of your tent. Thankfully, the baby lizard lounging on the bar of soap reminds me that I am, indeed, the minority life-form around here. I turned to dry my hands on a soft, pink towel and, to my delight, spotted several sleeping tree frogs nestled in the folds. This is heaven, I thought.

Now, I realize that lizards and frogs may not be the first things that come to a person’s mind when asked to describe paradise. It just so happens that if I were asked to describe what I thought heaven was like, I would answer that heaven is sharing the sink with a baby gecko in the middle of the rainforest, and realizing that we all belong here.