Read in the Jungle

On the second week of the first session of my second summer with Rustic Pathways (wow lots of numbers, sorry) and everything is going really well, very tranquilo. We only have 6 girls and 3 guides on Heart of the Jungle and I really get along with all of them so that's awesome. One of the guides is from Connecticut (Fairfield county-yeah THAT area, haha though he is your typical Connecticut boy, he does crack some good jokes here and there) and Mary, a girl with a cute midwestern accent from Ohio who's really into outdoors sports like rock climbing and kayaking and hiking. Everything's been running pretty smoothly, no accidents to date (though we start our 3 day kayaking trip in a gulf tomorrow so knock on wood), and people have only asked for the med kit a handful of times for more hydro cortizone cream or band aids for blisters. We've been having good luck with the weather, and all of our activities like climbing a huge fig tree, surfing, rappeling a 150-ft waterfall, have all gone smoothly. Our community service has been going well for the most part too, except for today. We got to the school that we were supposed to prep for painting around 2 and no one was there to greet us. They usually get out of school around 12:30, 1, but today they got our even earlier and no one was left in charge to help us. Apparently the principal (who we only talked to and coordinated this with a couple of weeks ago when we showed up with our manager and had a look of surprise and confusion and vague recollection of our 10 week painting project at the school and then had to write down the dates when we would be there because everything works this way in Costa Rica. You really can't plan in advance and can't get anything done until the last minute because Ticos (Costa Ricans) won't let you! Frustrating!). Anyways, we got there and the principal had left the teacher in charge to deal with us, but he forgot to leave someone else in charge when he had to flee off to a meeting and anyways, we ended up playing games and telling stories to the girls to keep them occupied until we figured out what to do (which ended up being going back to the first and only air conditioned hotel of the 2 week trip to rest, pack for the kayaking trip, and watch TV!!).

One of the stories I told was about this book I'm reading which is really interesting. It's called Marching Powder and is about a Bolivian prison called San Pedro where prisoners have to pay an entrance fee, buy their own cell in a particular section that has a star rating, eat in restaurants and cook their own meals inside the prison walls, and bribe guards for everything, including letting their wives or girlfriends live with them in the prison or so they can have a 'night out on the town' and be back in their prison before 3 a.m. (which if they're not, they then have to bribe the guards even more to let them back in after the established curfew!). The book is told from the point of view of Thomas McFadden, an English guy nabbed for trying to smuggle 4 kilos of cocaine back to Europe. He smuggled it quite cleverly actually, hiding it in the wall of his suitcase and making sure not to leave and fingerprints or hairs and putting women's clothes in there so they couldn't trace the luggage back to him, but he was caught when the head police guy who he had bribed turned him. Eventually this guy started giving tours to foreigners who visited La Paz, Bolivia, of this wild, cracked-out prison, and Lonely Planet guidebook named it one of the most bizarre tourist attractions. A ridiculous story, and I can't wait to finish and see how this corrupt system comes to let McFadden finally go back to England.