Planting Day

So I'm feeling pretty good right now. Tonight I took A_ and her roommate to go and get massages, yes that would be my second in three days for those of you who are counting. They wanted to go to some other place that did this foot massage thing and then a whole body massage. It was pretty great. I mean, what's there not to like about somebody rubbing on your back for 2 hours. We got the hot stones treatment, the Tibetan foot thing, the works. And for under $10 I decided to take one for the team and go. Earlier today K_ and I drove out to a village and spent the day working on a farming project that he is starting up. One of the things that they are trying to do out here is set up a nonprofit type of company. Last year he went to this village and tried out some new corn planting techniques that were very successful. This is allowing the people to grow better crops and hopefully make more money. Today's project was to construct a tree nursery and plant some acacia trees. A lot of the people out here get land from the gov and they can use them for whatever they want. The problem is that a lot of the land is up on the mountain so it isn't great for crops and most of the families don't have enough people to work that extra land. So K_ has the idea of growing these trees that are easy to manage, can grow on the mountain, and can be sold for profit. The game plan is to try and get this test nursery going and if everything is successful, start up a large one and then transplant the trees to the extra land the villagers have. We've figured that if half the villagers in a small village do this it can bring an extra $1000 USD to that village, which is a huge impact. So anyway, we went out and talked to one of the farmers that K_ worked with last year and he let us use some of his land for the nursery. It was a good trip (and even better since I didn't have to eat a weird lunch or spend the night out there).