Before I got to the states, I was a little concerned about not speaking Spanish for almost two weeks. My concerns were pretty much discarded when I had an improvised conversation with a maid. I forget sometimes how much my spanish has improved since being here. I can remember talking with a parent of one of my science students several years ago and accidentally requesting to leave a massage (masaje) instead of a message (mensaje). I´m sure I still make some mistakes now, but I think I´ve gotten past the point of being embarassed about those mistakes. Mark and I have even been asked if we were Venezuelan, which I thought was pretty rad.
On the last day of my visit, my parents and I spent a beatiful, although overcast, day at the beach. My dad even had a close encounter with a sea lion that was pretty magical. It was hard to tear myself away from the ocean at the end of the day, but I was thankful that we had decided to make the trip. When it came time to go back to the airport, there were many tears, and we decided it was best for all of us if my parents dropped me off at the curb rather than torturing ourselves with the vagueness of a security checkpoint goodbye. I was blessed with on time flights all the way back to Tarija, and I even got to sit in a spacious exit row on one of the longer flights. I had a really short layover in La Paz and was worried that I wouldn´t make my connection flight to Cochabamba. When we arrived at customs, they seemed to be searching most people´s bags. My bags were stuffed to the brim with goodies and it would have taken a long time even to jam everything back in, let alone explain why I had so much with me. Luckily, when I pressed the stoplight-esque button that declares whether I´d be searched or not, I got the green light.
Earlier, I referred to having some goals for my experience here. I had been feeling pretty crappy, which I figured nobody really would want to read about. Mostly, I was having a lot of anxiety about speaking in Spanish and getting out of our room into the town. Part of what was happening is that I was under a lot of stress, which is pretty natural for someone in our position. I´ve now started a self-care regimen that includes daily yoga, journaling, and cooking, as well as some sort of project work each day. As I discovered when I was getting in shape for the wedding, I tend to not give myself much credit for my accomplishments and I´m always pushing myself to do MORE. It helps me a lot to write down what I´ve done so that I can see it in writing. So I´ve started adding little symbols to my calendar to show myself when I work and work out. Since then, it´s been a lot easier to get out of bed in the morning, knowing that I´ve got at least a little bit of a plan for the day. It took some humility to admit to myself that I needed a little structure and routine, which I think I had been seeing as a weakness I didn´t want to have. I give myself credit for even the smallest thing, and I still have plenty of free time.
As far as my work, things are really picking up with the school garden project. In the pictures above, you can see how much the parcel of land we work on has changed since July, when the first picture was taken. Mark and I have been mainly responsible for the construction of two seed beds, where seeds are grown closer together until they are ready to be transplanted. I´ve never been very good at keeping plants alive, so I was really excited to return from the states and see our first bed thriving with greens. We had planted lettuce, bell pepper, cabbage, swiss chard, spinach, and cauliflower in mid-August and as of now, all of those seedlings have been transplanted into larger plots. Here´s the before and after pictures of the first seed bed. I put my hand in there for scale, but in case you can´t tell, the dimensions are 1 meter wide and 5 meters long.
____________________________before
__________________________(August 15) 
My other project, which is moving slowly along, is to construct and manage a worm composting bin. We had some wood left over from a home-improvement project, so after reading ¨Worms Eat My Garbage¨ which is an excellent guide, I built a table-sized bin. The worms will live and work in a bed of moist recycled paper with some added grit to help their little gizzards grind up potato peels and other kitchen left-overs. I´ve been weighing our kitchen scraps, which has averaged about 2.5 kilos per week, which will be about enough to feed 1 pound of worms. I need to gather 2.5 kilograms (about 5 pounds) of paper, which I then shred by hand or with scissors. The cat really enjoys playing in the bag of bedding. I have added ventilation holes to the box using a hand operated drill and one of the next tasks will be to visit a nearby community that has a thriving project already going. I may be able to harvest and buy some of their worms, otherwise there´s a store in Tarija that I´ll check out. I´m not sure whether worm composting will be picked up by people in our site because they tend to feed their kitchen scraps to their pigs, which is another good way to recycle them. I just want to know how to do it for myself so I can do it when we come back to the states.
With all the dust in El Puente, there´s always sweeping, mopping, or washing of clothes do be done. I´m really enjoying the simplicity of those actions, as well as the cooking. Since the supply of fresh produce is a little irregular in our site, we have to improvise meals based on what´s available, which can be both fun and challenging. We´ve got a decent recipe book put together by PC volunteers, titled ¨Donde no hay cocinera.¨ (title translates to ¨where there is no chef¨ more or less) I also got an excellent Thai peanut sauce recipe from an outgoing volunteer that was really easy and super tasty, so I figured I´d share it here: 
______________________________after
______________________________(date)
Since then we have built a second seed bed, with a little better design in mind than the first one. The soil is very clay based, and so we tilled in sand, manure, and ¨tierra colorada,¨ which is a rockier, better draining soil brought down from the surrounding hills. It was quite an adventure bringing the sand from the river bank, during which my wheelbarrow and I became intimately aware of every small irrigation ditch between the garden and the river. There were many places where the front wheel would get stuck and I´d have to walk around to the front and lift the wheelbarrow to keep it going. Only once did I lose about a third of the load of sand in a slow-motion sideways collapse into a small ditch. I felt a little bad because I couldn´t clear all of the spilled sand out of the ditch and I knew someone would be using the ditch to irrigate his crops. Mark was busy tilling up the area where the seed bed would be with a pick and he said watching my return trip from the river reminded him of a scene from a monty python movie where the same clip is used over and over to show a group of people rushing a castle. Everytime he looked up to see how I was progressing, I didn´t seem to get any closer.
The onions that we planted around the same time as the first seed bed will be ready to harvest in February, when school is back in session. Something that isn´t working out so well is that most of the crops that are growing right now may be harvested during the school vacation, which is during the months of December and January. I guess next year, we´ll need to start the whole process earlier so that it works out better.
My other project, which is moving slowly along, is to construct and manage a worm composting bin. We had some wood left over from a home-improvement project, so after reading ¨Worms Eat My Garbage¨ which is an excellent guide, I built a table-sized bin. The worms will live and work in a bed of moist recycled paper with some added grit to help their little gizzards grind up potato peels and other kitchen left-overs. I´ve been weighing our kitchen scraps, which has averaged about 2.5 kilos per week, which will be about enough to feed 1 pound of worms. I need to gather 2.5 kilograms (about 5 pounds) of paper, which I then shred by hand or with scissors. The cat really enjoys playing in the bag of bedding. I have added ventilation holes to the box using a hand operated drill and one of the next tasks will be to visit a nearby community that has a thriving project already going. I may be able to harvest and buy some of their worms, otherwise there´s a store in Tarija that I´ll check out. I´m not sure whether worm composting will be picked up by people in our site because they tend to feed their kitchen scraps to their pigs, which is another good way to recycle them. I just want to know how to do it for myself so I can do it when we come back to the states.
With all the dust in El Puente, there´s always sweeping, mopping, or washing of clothes do be done. I´m really enjoying the simplicity of those actions, as well as the cooking. Since the supply of fresh produce is a little irregular in our site, we have to improvise meals based on what´s available, which can be both fun and challenging. We´ve got a decent recipe book put together by PC volunteers, titled ¨Donde no hay cocinera.¨ (title translates to ¨where there is no chef¨ more or less) I also got an excellent Thai peanut sauce recipe from an outgoing volunteer that was really easy and super tasty, so I figured I´d share it here:
Thai Peanut Sauce (serves 2 hungry people)
2 Tbsp oil
3 scallions, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, mashed
1 Tbsp freshly grated ginger
½ C peanut butter
¼ C white vinegar
¼ C soy sauce
1 C water
3 T brown sugar
¼ tsp hot pepper flakes
Saute the scallions, garlic, and ginger in oil for 1 minute. Then add the remaining ingredients, heat and stir until it reaches the desired consistency. Yummy with stir-fried chicken and steamed vegetables (we recommend broccoli and carrots) over steamed rice.
________________________________________________________________
And lastly, some important family pictures, for you animal lovers out there...
__________________________ My furry boys___↑
____________________↑ Salta helping out with the chores
____Yes, that is the place in the roof where we once saw the centipede.
1 comments:
Hey Erica! Wonderful post, it is good to see your garden growing. Shelly Caulkins has composting worms and she says they are great, they just churn through the scraps and the boys love to feed them. Thanks for the postcard!
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