How Does Your Garden Grow?

So, I made three new posts today, if your are just tuning in, you may want to scroll down to check the earlier posts!

The one newer project that we are most excited about is our flowers and vegetables. We finally got started on all of our seeds and bulbs that we brought in from the States. One day we started working on our garden area, just digging a hole for our compost and turning over a plot of land. Lots of people saw us out there… I’m sure word traveled through the Canton. After that we started getting a lot of help. First we needed to plant our seeds. We got some seed trays from my counterpart, Secundino. Originally we were just going to do a few, but here the farmers don’t just do a few, and they were all so excited about all of our strange seeds, that the next thing you know we had planted 500 seeds in the seed trays!

So, then they decided that they needed to help us prepare the soil too… I think that they just didn’t want two gringos to ruin all of those fine seeds! So a couple of days later we all worked as a group to prepare a bunch of “camas” or beds for the seeds and bulbs. Here are some pictures of all of this fun. All in all we prepared about a quarter acre of land and plotted out where are perennials would go next to the asequia (small canal for soil conservation, so this area doesn’t get turned over), and tried to come up with an attractive overall plan. We will have Gladiolas, Sunflowers (Jirasols), and Carnations (clavels) for our flowers. Our veggies are mostly for our use, and just to see how some different varieties do down here, they include Lemon cucumber, yellow, orange and red bell pepper, basil, rosemary, Serrano pepper and Thai pepper. A little later we will grow some different squashes and maybe asparagus and artichoke.

Hopefully in a month or so I we be posting a bunch of pictures of our great garden! The big question is how all of this stuff is going to do once the rainy season starts? Roughly next month the rains will start, with the peak months being July and August. It think some of our plants will love it… others may rot. By August or so I hope to have a small greenhouse so that I can start some new plants to plant near the end of the rainy season… then grow them into the dry season… It’s all a learning experience!

School Work

Katie, during this time was working more with the school. She worked hard on a “charla” on how to compost, and build an abonera. She got the kids to help dig a hole to start putting the organic material in for future compost. We will need it, the school doesn’t have very good soil, and we have plans for both a flower and a vegetable garden.

Here are some photos of how hard the kids actually work to take care of the school grounds. This was a planned workday, though they did focus on a lot of the areas were we plan to try to grow flowers and veggies. Even the smallest kids work pretty hard, and they all know how to work a machete and “azadon” (hoe).

We also started teaching English classes. It is crazy how difficult that is for us… it is a tough language, and we were never taught how it all goes together in school, or why we say certain things in certain ways. We started by focusing on the teachers, most of whom have to teach English as part of their curriculum (funny, since they can’t really speak or read it themselves). We also opened it up to the students above the age of 9. The interesting thing is that the kids that showed up, and have proven to be the best students are the 10 to 12 year olds. The older students pretty much didn’t show up… too worried about being cool I guess. It is that age (over 12) that we have the toughest time hitting it off with. If we had a good “cancha” nearby I could play soccer and maybe meet them that way, but the “cancha” is way off down the hill. Pretty much no one is there except for scheduled game times, very different from other communities where the cancha is the center of “town”.
One exception to that age group thing is that there is a group of the “instituto” (high school) girls that use us to help with their English homework. We enjoy having them come over and quiz us on English… mostly we are probably just doing their homework for them, but we do learn some new Spanish for our trouble…

It's All About the Worms

So, I promised that I’d have a blog entry about what we are actually doing these days, with pictures and everything… so here goes! Once we arrived back in our site, we just seemed really busy. It was good, lots of stuff to do, and actually making some progress on a few things.

I was focused on helping any way that I could with the Lombrisa (worm) project. For those that have forgotten, the group of people I am working with started this project before we arrived, they were building a big worm composting plant. Basically we put in fairly easy to obtain materials, like the pulp from the coffee bean, some cow dung… and voila, 3 months later the worms have made this great compost! The idea is that this will make money for the association. The market is to facilitate anyone who wants to try to convert to organic farming, or at the very least provide a lower costing fertilizer. Here are a few photos of the worm project. You can see there are plenty of worms, and the “pilas” are full. Each pila will produce more than forty 100 pound sacks (I’m guessing, real figures to come in the future). Oh, a quick aside, 100 pounds as a measurement here is called a “quintal” it has survived even in today’s metric world.

One of the things I helped with was a couple of work days up on the “cerro”. We had to go collect “brosa de montaña” which is forest duff. It’s one of the components that goes into our compost. It meant scooping the humid duff layer into big sacs, then carrying those 80 pound plus sacks on your back up to a “road”. It was a good couple of days of working as part of a team with the group, plus good hard work, which is part of what I was hoping for when I joined this whole thing. Here are some photos of the work, as well as one of my counterpart who climbed up a tree to look at a few of the epiphytes. He is a great guy to work with, I feel lucky, I only wish there were a few more like him working in our group. He always ends up doing the lion’s share of the work and is overloaded. This is one of the many problems facing our association, not enough good leaders to share the work… everyone thinks they want new projects, but they want someone else to mange and do most of the work… Kinda sounds like some workplaces I know of.

Long Journey Home Part 2

Upon, arrival in LAX we thought it a bit strange they didn’t announce anything about the continuing flight to San Salvador, all the same we stayed in our seats, waiting for the rest of the people to get off the plane. Usually they want to take a count before letting you off, or letting you stay on. When we finally ask the steward about the whole thing, they said that this plane isn’t going on to San Salvador, as if it was normal. Now to explain a bit, our reasoning… the plane had the same flight number, when we boarded at SFO the board at the gate said San Salvador as well as all of the TV monitors, and we had tickets with the same seat numbers as we were already in, which is only normal when you are staying on the same plane… Ok, so what gives… we arrive in LAX and all of a sudden it is like an alternate reality. The cabin crew has no idea that they should be going to El Sal, and when we get off the plane a go out to the gate, no one is there to greet us and tell us what to do about our connection, in fact we have to explain that we are going on to El Salvador! What happened to that plane we boarded just a short hour and a half ago? Just so that we knew we weren’t completely insane, or had somehow just slipped on to some random plane and no one caught us, there was one other person on the flight who thought that they too were going to San Salvador. It is late at this point, about 1:15am the airport is all but deserted. The gate people are trying to be helpful, but why weren’t they prepared for us? All they had to do was pay attention to the electronics… the computer knew we were going on to San Salvador. I decide to ask about the whole flight thing, and why this plane isn’t going on to San Sal. They say that it never does, that there is another plane here in LAX that goes on to San Sal, and we missed that. But why does it have the same flight number as a flight that leaves from SFO, but in reality is just an SFO to LAX commuter type flight? They don’t really have an answer, but just explain that that’s the way it is….

After calling up our information, they decide to try to get us out using an agreement with TACA. They ask each other a lot of questions and it is obviously a complicated process, something about printing to the right printer for the right cardstock, and other strange processes. They also called over to check with TACA. Finally we had new tickets for a 2:30 or so flight with TACA, it was about 1:45 by now. Now, I would have thought that they would have some way to rush us over to the other terminal, or at least escort us so we’d know the way. In a sense they just handed us the tickets and that was that… I had to ask how to get to the TACA terminal, they explained the bus system something about stand underneath a blue sign, and downstairs. I should explain at this point that I have spent quite a bit of time in LAX, but even that it was all in the same terminal, I didn’t terminal hop just for fun. So, really I have no idea how terminal 7 sits in respect to terminal 3 (not positive on numbers at this point), so walking isn’t really an option. I know LAX is U shaped, but I wasn’t sure you could cut across. So, we wait for the bus, and wait, and wait at after 2 in the morning, there is not much traffic, and little need for interterminal buses because most of the flights have left, and connections to the later flights should have arrived much earlier. So about a half hour passes and the bus finally shows (time passes even slower when you are tired, and trying to rush to catch a plane). We arrive at the TACA desk, to shorten the story a bit, the bottom line is that they really didn’t have room, but the killing stroke was that during all of the strange computer mumbo jumbo to get the tickets something went wrong and they couldn’t pull us up on their computer system. So now TACA can’t get us out tonight, and they really can’t help us because we aren’t on their system and we really aren’t their responsibility at this point. So, what do we have to do? Go back over to United, back to the bus (still more than infrequent) and back to the United area. Now at this point the people who previously helped us are safely esconced behind the security screening, which is closed at this hour, and even if open, we’d need a non existent boarding pass to get through. So, we head up to ticketing, and it is all shut down with no one due there till at least 5am. We head downstairs to luggage and just by chance run into some off duty personnel in the left luggage office. We explain our plight to them, they are not excited to help us, although they are able to figure out who screwed up and how (that made them feel better). They tell us that we are going to have to take tomorrows flight at 11:50pm. We ask what we do till then, and they explain that they will get us vouchers for hotels and such. Again very helpful, but again, as the future will show…not so much…

We now have vouchers for a Supershuttle, a Holiday Inn Express, and breakfast lunch and dinner, it is 3:30. We head back out to the bus area again, this time under a red sign. We wait, and wait…we see lots of weird shuttles, but none are super. Finally this other shuttle driver stops by and asks us where we need to go. We tell him we have a voucher for Supershuttle, and it probably won’t work for him… he tries to convince us to scratch out the name Supershuttle and write in his service, I say I’d love to, but I’d be doing so right above the line that states the voucher isn’t valid if altered in any fashion… I’m not sure his company would get paid. He tells us that Supershuttle doesn’t even run at this hour. We start to believe that’s true. I thought that the United folks called a shuttle for us (would make sense, they did tell us not to worry and to go straight outside and wait). Katie goes back inside, at this point everyone from United is gone, but Katie find the phone to call the shuttle and finds out that indeed, they do not run at this hour. The person takes pity on us and says he’ll try to call up a driver for us. Sure enough a bit later we are on our way. We arrive at the hotel, which was a ways from the airport. The guy behind the desk is very nice, but he does make a point to tell us that because they don’t have a restaurant, that the vouchers we have for meals can’t be used there. They do have a nice complementary breakfast though. We are tired, and will figure it out in the morning… so we finally get to go to bed around 4am.

[now this is getting too long really, but to do the story justice I have to go a bit longer]

We get up just a few hours later to catch the breakfast, and not get our inner clocks too screwed up. The breakfast is sufficient, not bad really. We talk about what to do today, and take a walk around the neighborhood. We decide to sleep a bit more, and then get up and see if we can find a place for lunch. Lunch is a bust, no one will take vouchers (checked other hotels with restaurants, must use at “your” hotel), so we pay for our own lunch at a nice café that roasts it’s own coffee. Rather than pay for our own dinner though, we decide to head to the airport a bit early and see if they can take care of us, or at least complain. Still, we have quite a bit of time to kill, so we decide to rent bikes from our hotel and ride down to Venice Beach. Now this was true culture shock! What a weird place! I had been down in the area before visiting my friend Rick, but I had forgotten what a strange planet this area of So Cal beach life is. I’m sure my senses were heightened due to 5 months in El Salvador, but man we are twisted vain and materialistic people… Still, it was really nice to get out and exercise, and what more fitting punctuation to our strange journey than to be heading to El Salvador, and end up in Venice Beach!

After a bit more rest, we head to the airport too seek out dinner. We head to the gate desk and explain our troubles with the vouchers. They explain that the work with the airport vendors and we should have just come here for breakfast and lunch. I explain that we only had one voucher for Supershuttle, and that we were quite a ways from the airport. Once they realize that, they understand. They let us know that actually only certain vendors will take the vouchers, these include Starbucks, Route 66 and a Mexican Place. Route 66 was already closed, so we eat Mexican. At this point I am pretty upset (for me anyway) about our treatment. Really at this point no one has really apologized for anything, they have been nice, but in a very incomplete fashion. We have tickets to tonights flight but they are not the First Class type that we had last night… I mean if we had volunteered to be bumped from a flight, we would have been given a room, food and a free ticket voucher (laying around in the many airports this trip, I heard that announcement many times), but because we were not volunteers but instead were forced into this situation due to airlines poor logistics we simply get to suffer with whatever mishandled aid they offer.

Anyway, to finish this up... I did talk the customer service rep into giving us standby on a First Class upgrade (because we had it on out previous tickets)...an we won the crapshoot and did end our flight to El Salvador on First Class... that helped a little.

Now we are back, and there are lots of things to tell you about! Since I have this one out of the way, I can now move on to what we are actually doing down here again. The next post should be next week, and should have photos, woo hoo!