In this series titled Volunteering Chronicles: Wild heart and helping hands, I will address the questions most often asked to me with regards to volunteering (or internships). Obviously, my experience is restricted to wildlife and environmental organizations.

Tell us about any interesting experiences you had while volunteering.

This was during a volunteering experience in Agumbe. We had a day off, and four of us decided to visit the famous Onnake-abbe falls. We not only ended up getting lost, but also ended up losing something else! A lot of blood! The entire forest was teeming with leeches that were making their way up our bodies and sucking the blood out! It was definitely a gala day for those leeches and an itchy one for us.

When we finally found our way and headed back to the village, we stopped for some tea and snacks. The locals looking at our bloody feet and legs looked amused as they whispered to each other in Kannada, “these are the crazy people who go into the forests looking for animals!”. Perhaps this was the silver lining, our adventurous and bloody day was at least a source of entertainment for some people!

So this wraps up my series on Volunteering Chronicles: Wild heart and helping hands.

For those of you who are arriving at this post directly, you can also check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the series. Also, I had also written a post on leeches previously, called Leechy Affairs.

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