Ashlie at The Green Iguana Project

This is a picture of me with my home stay mom, Shelly. She is one of the ladies that cooks for us at the Nab and her husband (Eddy) is who I have been working with for my internship, so I stayed with them for the last two weeks and we made tortillas! For the last two weeks I’ve been catering to the needs of 55 green iguanas. I’ve been interning with The Green Iguana Project at the San Ignacio Hotel and I have loved it! Eddy takes care of the iguanas and gives tours at the hotel so he was my supervisor and teacher. Every day we rode our bikes to work at about 7 am. Once at the hotel we cleaned the iguana enclosure and fed them papaya, bananas, cucumbers and assorted leaves cut from whatever was growing around the exhibit. For the rest of the day we did general maintenance stuff like raking and gardening, but sometimes there were tours. Eddy gave tours about the iguanas and the history of the project as well as tours on the medicinal plants trail. I have learned a lot about plants here, everything seems to have a special use and there are so many different fruits! I tried a new kind called caimito which I love, and I have now had three different kinds of bananas. This week and last week we also got a canoe and went looking for iguana eggs! Locals like to eat iguanas, they call them bamboo chicken, as well as the eggs and people are killing too many of them. Along with habitat destruction they are becoming highly threatened and that is why the project was started. It was really good to experience how a conservation project works, and also to spend time with the other workers who spoke mostly Spanish so it was great practice for me. I was really nervous about the internship before I started, but I really loved the new experiences and just hanging out with some local Belizeans.