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.