Helena Mactier

The Jagiellonian Children's University Foundation is a non-profit organization that allows kids to take part in seminars or activity classes Saturdays in the Jagiellonian University's official academic buildings. The volunteers help manage the children once every two weeks or so, ranging from three to six hours a day. The groups of children can be anywhere from 10 to roughly 60, and the number of volunteers active is usually adjusted accordingly.

I helped in the lab work of researchers interested mapping out the location of the endangered European Hamster. A group of field researchers collected owl pellets and fox stool and marked their location, and after freeze-drying it over a period of time in order to kill possible harmful parasites it was my job to sort through and clean the contents of these materials, and check for any bones or feathers. I then had to organize and document the findings. There were no European Hamster remains in the samples I was working on, which sadly points to its accelerated endangered status, but nonetheless the bones and feathers of other animal species could prove useful for other researchers, so we kept them carefully organized by keeping the samples grouped under their original location.

It was an intensive language training camp at Malaca Instituto.