The End of April

I can't believe that April is already over. Time out here is flying by. May is going to fly by quickly too. My family is coming out to visit so two weeks in May is going to be spent traveling and showing them around. The past couple of weeks have been a little crazy. The end of the month is always pretty crazy here, but I've also adjusted my class schedule. A couple of weeks ago I pitched the idea of moving our only Friday class to another day. It turns out that everyone in the class and my teacher agreed that it would be easier, so now I only have classes on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Having a four day weekend is great for getting out to villages and traveling. Having twelve hours of language class crammed into three days means I have a headache by Wednesday, but four days on the weekend is more than enough time to recuperate. It also means that on Thursdays I can go out and do planting and stay for the weekend if I need to.

Over the past couple of weeks we have still been taking our corn trips on Thursdays. Last week we went a couple of hours away and planted a corn test plot. We also found two good places to try and plant coffee. The climate there still isn't ideal (they get a few days of frost every year) but it is good enough for us to set up a test plot and see what happens. Hopefully we can get the coffee test plots up and going in the next month or two. Really we won't need to plant the coffee until June, so we have a little bit of time. We need to get a lot of things together for it though, so we have plenty to do.

I went back to check on our first two corn test plots yesterday, and after two weeks we've got corn growing. About 80-90% of the seeds have germinated and have started to come up. I think that most of the other ones will within the next week. So the corn is looking good and our local farmers are taking good care of them. I spent the afternoon yesterday with one of the farmers eating lunch and just sitting around and talking. It was a great time. Anyway, I've got to run. I have a ton of things to do today.

Planting Season is Here

So planting season is officially underway out here. It means a lot of trips out to the village and being incredibly busy. It is a good busy though. I enjoy the village life. You wake up, go out to the field, and sit around the fire in the kitchen during the middle of the afternoon. It is pretty slow and boring, but there are a lot of opportunities to sit around and hang out with people. Last week my roommate and I spent the weekend down on the border of Laos looking at coffee. Some people had planted a few hundred plants that were dying. My roommate worked on a coffee plantation for a year so he is the local expert. The weekend there was fun, but it was HOT. I've realized how nice it is to be here where it is sunny and 70 degrees every day. We spent most of our time out in a village on the side of a mountain. It is amazing how just within a couple of hundred miles the culture is entirely different. Instead of being in the mountains and living in mud brick homes, we were in the middle of a jungle with people lived in wooden huts on stilts. The weekend was fun and I think we helped solve their coffee problem. We're still in the process of trying to find some coffee locations out here. We've looked in a couple of villages last month, but either the soil or the climate wasn't right at the locations.

We're also in the middle of corn planting season out here. Almost everyone here plants corn every year. We're working with a grant to do research on which corn varieties will perform the best in our location. Basically we get some land from a farmer in a village, plant nine different varieties, he plants his row next to ours the local way of doing it, and then at harvest we weigh the different varieties and see which one yields the most corn. It isn't rocket science, but it is an easy way to help out villagers (they can keep the corn since they let us use their land), and it also provides us ways to get out there for the next six months. So yesterday we went out and planted two different test plots in neighboring villages. One of the farmers who let us use his land was actually one of the guys I stayed with back in January. It was a great opportunity to reconnect with him, and I'll get to spend the next six months going to visit him. If anyone ever tells you that you can easily plant two fields in one day they are lying. We worked pretty much from sun-up to sun-down and barely finished before we ran out of daylight. We got it all done though. I think the game plan is that every Thursday for the next month we are going to be traveling to villages and planting corn and looking for coffee test plots. Anyway, that's about all that is going on out here. It is busy, but a lot of fun.