32 people with hoes and shovels != 1 tractor

Please excuse the nerdy title...

I spent 6 hours on Tuesday with 31 other people with hand tools clearing heavy clay mud the consistency of cake batter away from the irrigation canal. We're going back next Tuesday because we're still not done. It was good though, I got to talk to some new people, including a woman who asked me to come look at her tomate de arbol (tree tomato) plants, which are getting eaten up by some kind of fungus. More on that in a bit.

Other than that, this week I've given two lessons on making Bokashi, a type of souped-up compost that involves using plantains that don't make the cut to be sold in stores as a potassium source, as well as animal manure, wood ashes, sawdust or rice hulls, yeast, and brown sugar. Total cost, less than $4 for a giant pile. I gave my lesson and made batches with one of the schools here in town and at the health center in Marcopamba. The Marcopamba one went especially well, I thought. At first I wasn't sure it was going to go at all, because the doctor who said he'd bring the big sacks of sawdust and plantains (because he's got a car, among other good reasons), forgot. Or something. Anyway, we managed to scrounge up some sawdust because someone was cutting trees up the hill, the rest of the stuff is easy to find in a town where a few people still cook with wood and almost everyone has some kind of animals, and we just made it without the plantains. I just said it was like a 18-46-0 fertilizer instead of a 15-15-15 fertilizer. See, I'm learning things--like what those numbers mean, for example. (It's the amount of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium in a fertilizer). I also took some cuttings from a blackberry plant for a woman who wanted some, and we talked about kinds of corn, and what time of the moon you should plant what (that's big here) and so on and so forth. Oh, almost forgot, we may also be building a little greenhouse up there by the health center, so I had fun Wednesday afternoon (one of three afternoons last week it DIDN'T rain, so maybe summer is coming) building a little model out of sticks.

Lets see...on Friday I went to San Simon, just up the road a little ways, to visit Andrew, who works at a Foundation there. It's pretty different from what I do, in that he works there regular 8-5 days, taking care of animals, working in greenhouses, etc. It was neat to see some of the stuff they were doing.

Over the weekend I managed to get zucchini, swiss chard, lettuce, and beets planted, and I visited the woman with the fungi problems. She fed me a bunch of corn on the cob after we'd walked through her farm and I gave her a few suggestions. The corn here is supposed to be the best in Ecuador--I'd believe it, too. It's almost like US sweet corn. They can't actually grow sweet corn here, I guess because it gets too cold at night. That's the interesting part about being at nearly 8500 feet and also on the Ecuator. Makes for an interesting climate.

Today I got a lesson in Ecuadorian government inefficiency. We wanted to talk to the Prefectura (the provincial government office) about getting the bathrooms fixed in one of the schools I'm working with. So we showed up today, which is the day for dealing with random people, apparently. And then had to wait, and wait, and eventually literally push our way into the office to talk to the Prefecto for about 5 minutes, during which he said he'd look into it. About 3 hours of waiting for 5 minutes of talking. It's enough to make me a little crazy.

Oh, and I got my kitchen all nice and set up--I now have a sink, and cabinets, and some more counter space. And 2 new pots. The kitchen is my new favorite room in the house.

I'll post pictures of that, and the earth-moving work day, some other time. I'm at a different internet place, which doesn't seem to like my camera, so nothing today.

Also, if you have a favorite zucchini recipe, email it to me. We're going to try to get a recipe book together to give out with the zukes once they're ready!