Planning event

The rains have been taking care of watering the mangroves for me, yet many have continued dying in our nursery. On the positive side, the mangrove has been regenerating on its own pretty quickly, which is amazing! There are so many new mangroves growing on their own, now when you look around it looks better, you can see more green spots in between the dry trees. 

I was talking with my dad about dates for the event, and I will contact Ernst soon as well. I am planning on having it be the 21-22 or 28-19 of september, and I want the event to be for ages 14-17 so it’s easier to manage. I also think having 6 boys and 6 girls will be a good fit, that way we can fit 3 people in each room so we’d have 2 girl and 2 boy rooms. This is a manageable size group, if it’s larger, transportation and stuff like that can get more complicated, 12 we can split in a few cars. Since I had been busy or gone for a good portion of the break, I hadn’t been able to work on the nursery or on the event, and Felipe had been gone as well. A community member from Avellanas said he would help me collect seeds because he receives groups of volunteers so he has them clean the beach and make signs to raise awareness about keeping the beach clean, so now he said he could help me with that. Now that Felipe is back, we are going to meet next week to keep getting all the details for the event so we can start promoting it! We will also get in touch with Ernst and the ConnectOcean team, and talk to other stakeholders to polish out the plan. For now, I created the following schedule so now we can start figuring out how much money we will need, or if people are willing to donate activities such as the boat tour, etc. 

Saturday (September 21 or 28 tbd)

10:00 am- Meet in Tamarindo where the estuary/boats are, give short introduction about the event and explain about the tour we will be doing to see a healthy mangrove to then compare with the Avellanas mangrove which had died but is now coming back.

10:30 am- Go on boat tour through estuary, duration: about 2 hrs.

12:30 am- Finish tour and go to el Mercadito in Tamarindo for lunch (easier than a restaurant because everyone can just kind of get whatever they want but we can all eat at the same place).

12:40-50 ish- Arrive at el Mercadito, have lunch.

1:30/2 pm- Finish lunch and drive to Cabinas Las Olas

2:30/3 pm- Arrive at CLO and get everyone settled down in the rooms

3:30 pm- Meet at restaurant, ConnectOcean will give charla about importance of mangroves

4:30 pm- go tour Avellanas mangrove while telling a bit about the story of what happened and spend time at the beach and watch sunset, have a bonfire and eat marshmallows.

6:00-30 pm- Go back to rooms, shower.

7:15- meet at restaurant.. Have dinner. Movie screening? Discuss tomorrow’s plan. 

Sunday (September 22 or 29 tbd)

8:00 am- Meet at restaurant, have breakfast, breakdown planting activity. 

9:00 am- Have all materials needed at hand, go down to mangrove, PLANT!

12:00 ish- finish planting, go back, clean up, everyone packs out of the rooms, have lunch and say goodbye!