By Monique Pool | Director
This Valentine’s Day the sloths send you love from their now almost finished home in Suriname. In the past months we have been working hard on making the finishing touches to the separate rooms, and your donations have given us the financial support to actually do this. One corporate donor has taken on the outfitting of the intensive care unit and the related emergency care room, as well as the educational component of our center. Which brings me to the work of our star volunteer for this year, Wynne Minkes, who is back to finish her work on the educational part of our facility. Minkes received the Sloth Award 2017 this past Monday.
Education at the Sloth Wellness Center
Apart from a sanctuary for sloths, anteaters and armadillos (the Superorder of the Xenarthra), the Sloth Wellness Centre is also intended as an educational center. Here, GHFS will teach (school)children and adults from Suriname and abroad about these extraordinary South American animals and the dangers of deforestation. This type of education is much needed, as the average Surinamer still associates the forest with a scary and undesirable place to be in, and wildlife is mostly seen as a source of meat or even vermin that needs to be exterminated!
With beautiful photo's and interesting facts, we want to create sympathy and awe for the Xenarthra. Thus, we hope to create a future generation of Surinamers with more appreciation for its lush forest and its inhabitants. Few realize how unique Suriname is in the world, as it is still covered with 93% of pristine Amazon jungle! There will also be some activating 'sloth' games for children and adults alike.
The space on the ground floor between the two shipping containers is designated as the education space. One part of the information will be about the sloths, anteaters and armadillos occurring in Suriname (2 sloth species, 3 anteater species and 5 armadillo species). And all other information will be on GHFS' care taking of these animals, on the harmful effects of deforestation, and on actions that visitors can take themselves. We hope to show the results of our work in our next report!
First rescues of 2018
Where we left off in 2018 in our last report with Igor, the giant anteater, we started our year with the rescue and release of the tiniest anteater that lives in Suriname. The silky anteater. This animal that is often mistaken for a baby is with its 260 g an adult and an amazing nocturnal canopy dweller. Unfortunately, we only receive these animals from deforestations, because otherwise they do not come to the forest floor. As these animals are extremely sensitive, this adult silky anteater was released in the forest sanctuary behind the Sloth Wellness Center on the day we received it. For many years it was assumed that there was only one single species occurring throughout the whole of South America, but Flavia Miranda, our anteater friend from Brazil, established in a paper published at the end of last year that there are in fact 7 different species.
We thank you for your continued support and are looking forward to maybe seeing you at our center in the future.
By Monique Pool and Elise Mattison | Director and Returning Volunteer
By Monique Pool | Director
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