May 25: Trip to the Hospital
Today I finally made my way out to the hospital with Josh. We were supposed to go yesterday but that hospital wanted to charge much more than the estimate they gave us previously. Being that we are foreigners we have to use private insurance at a private hospital. (which may shortly happen throughout all of Spain as the government is trying to privatize healthcare due to the economic crisis in Spain. 25% are unemployed with 50% of college aged youth being unemployed as well). The hospital had promised that there would be people there able to speak English, but like my luck, nobody could. So we had to struggle to get some words out since I don't know medical terminology well but we made our way through it with absolutely no English speaking at registration and google translate with the doctor. It turns out that I have a muscle contusion which means my muscle is bruised. He said that I shouldn't be walking on it (but I'm not skipping the last week of work) and that it could take anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months to heal... Yay.
May 26: And so began our final week! >.< Our coworker from Canada, Nicole has returned from her week long vacation to Greece (her family lives in Northern Greece). The last day for all 3 of us will be Thursday. Since she leaves Saturday, Lucia wanted to give us all a day off. For this week, the agenda includes finally planting the plants! we've spent all month making the boxes and we will finally plant today! As for me, since I'm basically a Gimp right now, I am continuing work on the turtle cut outs. They will be having a fair here the day after we leave where they will share Tancat de la Pipa with the public so they can see what is going on :)
So I have found a knack for drawing turtles and Josh just happens to be a pro color-er. We are making these turtles to cut out and display in an actual turtle catching net so they can see the type of native turtles we want around :) Tomorrow we plant, today is just sort of a bum day and we didn't actually do anything. So hopefully tomorrow will be much more productive :) As for Josh and I , we are starting laundry for the return trip. Crazy to think we only have one more week :(
May 25: Today we finally planted the plants! I helped drag the boat down to use for transporting the plants but since my foot hurt so bad afterwards, I ended up back at the drawing table as they planted (which took all of an hour I think). Eduardo, Lucia's dog, kept me company along with a turtle we had found earlier (who I used as a model for my drawings). It is rewarding to know we have finally accomplished what we came here to do, to conserve and protect the environment. I hate that I missed it after all this hard work but it is cool to know that all those boxes we produced will protect the native species from birds and fish in the lake that we were here to fill and help ready for this whole process. As for the plants, some are more to provide food along the bottom, an algae of sorts, but we are also putting plants at the runoffs to help clean the water since it is still quite polluted. (Sadly we do not have any pictures of this activity so instead included are pictures of when we did water sampling and counted plants that were planted last year (surveying)).
This was one of our trips to the "oasis". Here is one of the local volunteers dog Enyah who unfortunately found a bunch of cacti needles and wounded up full of them (think Homeward Bound but MUCH WORSE). i got a few in my leg as I ran up to help her (I was the first to notice) and held her for a while before handed her off as people pulled out the needles. Pobrecita (same thing happened to me at benidorm but with smaller ones. ) 
Found a picture from our trip to the hemisferic
Surveying Plants from previous planting
One of the signs I made. this is the American Florida turtle that is invasive and destructive. The sign says not to release. 
A "water sample" taken off a stick near one of the lakes. Mosquito larvae in the upper left side. 
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