Previous Updates from Esperanza de Libertad...

Join us April 14, 2007 at 5:30 PM for the third annual benefit for Esperanza de Libertad
at Congregation Ner Shalom in Cotati.

We will have a vegan dinner, a slide show presentation by United States Project Coordinator Stella Sythe, and a silent auction. Blackbird Stitches will play talismanic dirt folk, and Best Witches women’s choir will sing. We will have activities for children and will sell vegan snacks. A $20 donation is suggested, or $30 including dinner. Nobody will be turned away for lack of funds.

Stella’s exciting slide show presentation illustrates Esperanza de Libertad’s mission of rescuing wild animals from captivity and rehabilitating them, and shows our progress towards building our sanctuary. It also gives a fascinating and educational look at life in Bolivia.

Our first two benefits were a lot of fun and were great successes. Esperanza de Libertad’s first benefit raised money to buy 115 acres of land in Bolivia. Our second benefit raised money to build volunteer housing. Now we have a beautiful building, and we’ve planted gardens and fruit trees on the land. We’ve hired a guard and his family to live on the land, protecting it from illegal hunting and logging. We also have two young rescued monkeys!

This year’s benefit will raise money for operating expenses, including paying the guard and feeding Tommy and Preto, our first resident monkeys. We are looking for volunteers to help at the event and for donations to the silent auction. For more information or to donate, call 481-5386.

Temple Ner Shalom is located at 85 La Plaza Court in Cotati. From San Francisco, it is about an hour North on Hwy. 101; you can also take Golden Gate Transit bus 80 to the Cotati hub. See http://www.nershalom.org/contact/ for a map.

February 19, 2007. Esperanza de Libertad has two new animals!

The first animal we accepted is a one-year-old capuchin monkey named Tommy. Tommy lived in an boarding house for children in Ixiamas. Tommy arrived at the boarding house in the middle of 2006. The father of one of the kids killed Tommy's mother and wanted to sell the baby in Ixiamas. A teacher bought Tommy for 50 bolivianos (7 dollars). The teacher and the children took good care of Tommy. As she grew, she became very mischievous and almost impossible to control.

One day we went to visit a friend who worked at the boarding house, and we met Tommy. We talked about Esperanza de Libertad and what we wanted to do. The teacher loved Tommy and thought she would be better off living in the jungle. The kids had gotten used to living with her, but they said that we could bring her to the land as soon as the school year ended. We visited Tommy several times a week and waited as the months passed. I came back to the USA and Franci went to pick up Tommy by herself. Franci took two monkeys with her to the land that day.

The day before, she had met a year-and-a-half-old spider monkey named Preto. While visiting a friend she heard the baby monkey crying and asked her friend about him. He said that Preto was very mistreated. Franci was told that Preto was often hit, was never fed, and was always tied up in the sun. This made Franci very sad. She left, but she could not stop thinking about him. The next day she went to visit. When she went near Preto, he wrapped his arms around her neck and would not let go.

Franci found out that Preto belonged to a driver who was always traveling and left him with different people. Franci asked the womyn watching him if she could take Preto and bring him to live in the jungle. The womyn said that it hurt her to watch him suffer so much and said yes. With Preto still clinging to her neck, Franci left before the womyn could change her mind. It was extremely hard but a very happy first day. When they arrived at the land, Tommy was crying but Preto was calm and happy. Tommy was better later in the day and began to become friends with Preto. Now, after two months on the land, Preto and Tommy are wonderful friends. Later a domestic kitten showed up at the house and became friends with the crew.

Franci says that when she is not weeding grass, her days are spent walking in the jungle with Preto and Tommy above her playing in the trees and Gato chasing them from below.

March 27, 2006

We are proud to let all of our supporters and friends know that Esperanza de Libertad has finished building a beautiful 3-room brick house. Please click here for pictures. The house is about 200 feet from the road and is surrounded by 115 acres of jungle. Lion monkeys have been a common sight as well as macaws and toucans. Right at sunset the whole area fills up with sounds as the animals settle in for the night. We attached the doors and locks and were handed keys on March 18, 2006. We are still living in Ixiamas but hope to spend a few nights a week on the land.

Building was quite the adventure. We were very lucky that the construction crew that we hired was amazing, and we hope to work with them again in the future. We left the building to them but we were in charge of buying the materials and getting them from Ixiamas to the land, about 7 miles (12 km) away. That does not sound hard but despite all our attempts to build in the dry season, construction began right as the rain did. This made the road very difficult to pass. To get to Esperanza de Libertad's land we have to pass Santariapu river. With the rain, many times the river grew and was impassable.

There was also no set transportation on the road and we had to find rides with anyone going that direction. This was usually on logging trucks or trucks that took rocks, dirt and sand from the river to sell for construction. Many times we found ourselves riding home on the back of a truck full of dirt.

Getting to and from the land was an adventure every time, and then try to imagine transporting 50 bags of cement or 3000 bricks! Twice we had to hire tractors when the road was impassable by truck. Both times we were stuck in the road cutting down trees and finding rocks to make bridges on parts of the road that fell in. I'll never forget being stuck in Santariapu river in a tractor for 4 hours. We were diving under trying to get the rocks out from underneath the tires while the rain poured and the river grew before our eyes. All I could do was look at the bags of cement and cross my fingers that we'd make it across without losing all of the materials. We did of course, though it took us 10 hours to drop the materials off. Or when we had to unload and reload 4 doors, 8 windows, 80 bags of stucco and 10 bags of cement because the tractor could not make it over a particularly steep mound. The worst was that we were only about 5 minutes from the land. Once again that 7-mile trip took about 10 hours.

Many times we went to the land in motorcycle taxis and on one occasion got stuck in a lightning storm on the way home. We wanted to pass Santariapu river before it became to big and impassable, so we passed through a raging river on a motorcycle with lightning and thunder all around. We found out that biking back from the land is much faster and easier because it is downhill, and we have gone on trucks with our bikes to work on the house and biked back on a few occasions. One time we were stopped by like 40 cows just staring at us. We were at a standoff for about half an hour till someone else just walked straight through them and looked at us like we were crazy when he saw us standing with our bikes on the other side. Those memories will stay with me forever.

We are so excited to have finished this step. The work we have ahead of us is a bit overwhelming and we hope to have volunteers come and help and hope our supporters will be able to continue donating money. We still need to build a composting toilet, find out how we are going to get water (build a well or bring it in from the river) and electricity (solar panels or generator) and start planting fruit for the animals we hope to offer sanctuary to in the future. Then we need to build a rehabilitation area for the animals. Once all of this is completed we hope to begin accepting animals. Please email us if you have advice on any of these subjects .

We see baby animals being sold daily in Ixiamas. This animals are being taken from the wild and most will die within the first year. We know that education is something we need to do in Ixiamas, right where the animals are being taken from the wild, and we are working on several leaflets in Spanish.

We also want to offer environmentally friendly work to the local people and are beginning to work on Ecotourism in the area. We hope to bring tourists here to visit our land and to see the amazing area surrounding Ixiamas. Not only will this offer environmentally friendly work to the local people, we also hope to raise money for Esperanza de Libertad.

If you want to help us continue this work, tax deductible donations can be sent to this address, or you can donate through Paypal. Here are a few examples of how your money will be spent.

For a donation of 5 dollars you can help us buy 1 banana plant.

For a donation on 10 dollars we can buy a bag of cement to begin construction of the rehabilitation area.

We need to buy 1000 meters of tubing to bring water from a nearby river to Esperanza de Libertad´s land. For a donation of 20 dollars you can help us to buy 4 meters.

If you have a larger sum to offer please consider helping us with the 600 dollars needed to buy a 75w solar panel. This panal will allow us to have electricity 5 hours a day.

Con Mucho Cariño de Bolivia,

Stella Sythe
Esperanza de Libertad Project Coordinator USA (in Bolivia)

Franci Pairo
Esperanza de Libertad Project Coordinator Bolivia

July 1, 2005

Our benefit was a great success and we raised almost $5,000, enough to buy a vehicle and to build the volunteer housing.

Jan. 30, 2005.

You can now donate to Esperanza de Libertad securely through paypal using your credit card!

Dec. 15, 2004. We have land!

Click here to see story and photos.

Sept. 6, 2004. Stella and Franci are closing in on the land purchase!

Click here to see their story, with photos.