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Nature Guides in HondurasAugust 1998
"You can't eat beautiful sunsets," nature guides say, implying that there's more to putting food on the table as a guide than simply bringing tourists to beautiful beaches, waterfalls, and sunsets. Last June I was offered a job by the Philadelphia-based RARE Center for Tropical Conservation training nature guides to promote wildlife conservation on the North Coast of Honduras. Before leaving, I wondered, "Would feeding tourists beautiful sunsets be enough - that and not getting them lost - to promote conservation?"
In July I touched down in the Caribbean port city of La Ceiba to answer that question. Two of my five Honduran collaborators worked here. They were young non-profit organizations managing the largest national park in Honduras, right outside of La Ceiba, and a wildlife refuge also just outside, a criss-crossing of mangrove channels and a population of elusive manatees. To the east, in Trujillo another collaborator managed two protected areas where Columbus landed on his last voyage in 1502.
To the West Tela had four more protected areas and a blossoming tourist scene. To the north, I worked on the island of Roatan, one of the best places in the world to go diving amidst coral reefs. These five oganizations badly needed guides; they had practically no one to attend tourists in English. Those few inexperienced guides or park guides who did attend tourists or school groups would normally bring the audience along a trail sometimes pointing out things and naming them, sometimes not. They would not use any special techniques, interpret nature, involve tourists in the interpretation, consider audience learning or interest, or have any goals besides getting the tourists to the other side. Tourists were passive followers, not participants in this tour.
But we did not intend to supply them with such traditional guides. In contrast, RARE Center's model calls for English-conversing, natural-history knowing, and interpretation-wielding guides. They would bring tourists from one end of a trail to another speaking the tourists' language informing about natural history.
And this is what many bilingual biologists hired by tour operators do. The general belief then is that if tourists come into contact with nature, they will be inspired to conserve it. Few, however, check to see if that actually happens.
The assumption says that tourists will be interested and will learn from the guide. But any educator knows that making students (or tourists) interested does not come easy. That is where a good guide differs from a traditional guide: they can make the trip interesting and relevant. To accomplish this a good guide grabs from his or her armory of techniques of natural objects, demonstrations, good body language, maps, bird books, stories, voice projection, emotion, and smiles.
Time flew by and soon the four WorldTeach course teachers had arrived in October from the US. Normally WorldTeach, a Cambridge, Mass.-based volunteer teacher NGO, sends its volunteers to countries around the world for yearlong assignments teaching mostly English. In our case they stay for six months teaching the entire course. The other RARE staffer and I began to teach them the educational hammers and forceps to forge good guides. We would immerse our students with English. We would splash them with dynamic teaching, and drench them with practical experience. Our guides, just like our teachers, had to be interesting and educational. Part of being inspired to conserve is to learn the important messages, to do that we must use everything we know about how the mind learns. Guides employ themes or main messages to tie together all the information they present; they are interactive; they build on tourists' prior experiences; they ask "why" (Why do warblers migrate from the US to Honduras?) and try to guide a tourist to discover answers for themselves, since discovery, especially hands-on, is one of the best ways to learn.
So tourists do not just trudge from one end of a trail to another in their own language being told interesting things about nature, but they actually learn as well. The guide, of course, doesn't tell tourists they are learning. But before a tourist can be involved in conservation, they need to understand and appreciate the conservation problem they are experiencing on their tour.
By November, our seven-person staff had prepared all materials. We and 15 North Coast students hopped in the back of six pickups and headed for our site in the mountains. The students took their oath of English only that they would speak NO Spanish during the three draining months the course is in the field. And the course began.
During the course, we encouraged the students to include some conservation message in all their tours. What came out of their mouths, however, did not solve too many environmental problems. "Deforestation is problem." "There is mucha contamination of the rivers..."
A foreign tourist like my mom, for instance, does not cut trees in Honduras. So telling her that a cessation of cutting will solve the problem leaves her participation home. So how then can she be involved in Honduran conservation? She could give a donation, I suppose, but how many tourists who had just spent their savings on American Airlines and little carved statues of Mayan warriors would give a donation? So I asked myself again how do guides help their own protected areas aside from bringing in entrance fees?
Then graduation day arrived; rejoicing abounded, as well as collapsing from exhaustion. The course had ended. Then the last week of March RARE Center staff who had been in the guide training programs in Honduras, Baja California Sur and Yucatan, Mexico, convened to evaluate our program.
There we forced ourselves to examine our assumptions. We used a common assumption in the field at the time that if there is a guide in a local community, people will see economic value in natural areas since someone is making money from it. Also we had been assuming like most, that if a guide leads a tourist to nature, conservation will follow. It became clear we needed a new explanation of how guides could contribute to conservation.
We reasoned, our guides have different audiences and for each they should be promoting different conservation techniques. Guides then take tourists from one end of a trail to another speaking in the tourists' language, educating and amusing them with nature, such that at the end they can offer ways on how those tourists can help the problem they have just experienced. Our recipe calls for a drop of inspiration, a drop of education, and two drops of conservation. Instead of being like drivers that slow down to oggle a mangled car on a highway and drive on, tourists can actually help the victim - the protected area.
A good guide works with schools, community groups, and international tourists. Each one can participate in different ways if our guides offer very specific suggestions. After participating in a presentation about a conservation problem, the guide and tourists talk about the needs of the protected area to tackle that problem. "We need volunteer students to carry out a surveyÉ We need to translate a brochureÉ We need old magazines and contacts with organizations that donate books to fill the visitor centerÉ" In the case of Roatan, one graduate saw that cruise ship tourists were damaging a coral reef. He moved to work with the cruise line and resort that hosted the tourists to give them presentations motivating them not to walk on the reef.
A creative tourist can do more than give money. Students can built nesting boxes, paint signs, collect cans, plant trees in the protected area. Community groups can petition government, offer labor, get small loans and grants. It's the guide's responsibility to suggest viable and varied ways to promote conservation and help the audience carry them out. Audiences and guides need help to think up these ideas, so now we teach them. To earn a living as a conservation nature guide, they have to eat more than just a steady diet of beautiful sunsets.
As you go along a tour and learn about the situation in a particular location you can remain conscious of what kinds of materials or help might make the tour better or might help the situation. Sometimes the guides will make allusions to things their foundation lacks. If you have some free time or extra dollars that you dont want to give away as a simple hand out or by becoming a member of the foundation consider some of the following:
Foundations are always looking for help. They especially need students to do studies on any aspect of the natural or social sciences and to translate them into Spanish when they are done; if you have special skills in computers, in graphics, in translation, in carpentry, knowledge about a particular biological area, construction of infrastructure in a park, or something make a proposal to offer some time if you have it to spare. They may not be sure on how to accommodate your offer, but on the other hand, they may just have the perfect task.
If back at home you have old nature magazines, nature books (especially in Spanish), old binoculars or other field or camping equipment or know an organization who could collect old attic equipment, collect and let the NGOs know or send an email or fax to the executive director of REHDES which is another NGO that serves as umbrella for those mentioned in this article. The director speaks English and can be reached through any of the media used to reach FUCSA. This person will contact the NGO and serve as liaison and try to find someone who is coming down to Honduras to deliver your donation.
Are you a good photographer? If you take photos or slides (especially slides) donate a copy to the foundation. They are always looking for images and they usually have somewhere and somehow to use them whether in schools or exhibits or fundraising. Send them! And if you took them with a guide send them specifically to that guide to make sure they end up where they are supposed to.
Jon Kohl works for RARE in Honduras.
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