Things have been just about the same here in the last week and a half.  I’m getting a better sense of the way of life here (read: very slow and lots of family time), and I finally worked out my living situation.  I know in the last blog it seemed I was set up already, but that house fell through.  Luckily, there was another empty dwelling, which is much smaller but big enough for me.  I almost didn’t get that house either because they are expanding it this summer for future use…but the owner took pity on me and said I could live there as long as the construction wouldn’t bother me.  It might a little, but of course I said yes as long as they tell me when the workers are going to show up.  My impression is that they’re not building directly onto my house, but more like in my front lawn.  What a relief to not have to invest in building a house—it would have been really hard to do and after seeing houses that were already standing, I didn’t want to deal with the headache.

 

I’ve gone swimming in our river a few times.  It’s really pretty and extremely refreshing in this heat.  There’s just about nothing you can do to feel cool when it’s so hot—it’s a heat you don’t believe until you experience it.  I bought a fan, which helps at night, but when you’re out working in the day (it gets hot at about 8am), you just have to wear a hat and convince yourself you’re “sweating out the toxins.”  That’s why most people around here don’t work much in the summer.  Though my host family does, because they have irrigation (another reason most people don’t farm in the summer, which is December to April here, is that there isn’t always water).  People seem impressed that I work alongside my host family, and as word gets around people are being more enthusiastic about showing me their crops and saying we should work together some time.

 

The other day I feel like I actually imparted knowledge, when I suggested that we make barriers around our raised beds into which we were about to plant cucumbers.  In just a week after working that soil into beds, the heavy rains had really almost flattened them again, and I’m sure a lot of good topsoil went to never never land.  To avoid this process, I suggested we intervene.  So the two older boys and I hauled banana stems from various parts of the property and we arranged them around the beds.  Hopefully we can see that the soil stays within the barriers now.  I wonder if it will have a measurable effect on production.  It was a pretty easy process, sort of blows my mind that this isn’t already done considering the vast amounts of barrier material and the well-acknowledged erosion problem (they express it as "soil washing" here).  Next step: try this technology with more people!