Coffee!

Well we've finally got some coffee in the ground. It has been a huge ordeal. Somehow whenever I look at a project on paper it seems so much easier than it ends up being.

Our coffee had to come from an area about ten-hours south of here, and because there is no infrastructure, we had to drive down there and pick it up ourselves. You also can't just google 'coffee seedling supplier' and come up with anything either, so it took a lot of phone calls and chasing down leads to finally find a guy willing to sell to us. Then it took a good two weeks of delays for him to actually get the seedlings bagged and ready for us to pickup. It is kind of strange that you can call a guy four times and tell him that you are coming on a certain day, but he doesn't believe you until you actually show up. Long story short, we picked up our coffee last week and have been eagerly trying to get it in the ground.

We have two test plots for our coffee. One of the guys that is letting us use his land is a friend of a friend, and so I don't know him all that well. We went out and dug holes to plant the coffee at his place last week. When I say we dug holes I mean we dug HOLES. These things are a good 1 1/2 feet wide by 1 1/2 feet deep. After digging one hundred of those with a hoe, I had no problem getting to sleep that night. We had his field all prepared so that when we went back yesterday we could just add manure, put in the seedlings, cover it up, add water, and go home.

It turns out that wasn't what happened. After we finished up our second coffee test plot yesterday (which had no hiccups by the way), we went back to our friends to plant the coffee. I figured it would take a couple of hours and we could be back home by dark. We arrived and ended up having to wait on the guy to bring the manure. While we were sitting there a lot of the villagers were coming by and talking about how we were growing coffee. Because I can speak the local language I could hear them talking about how they were planning on stealing the coffee after we planted it in the ground. So that was a little bit of a problem. We ended up deciding to move the test plot from his field (a fifteen minute walk away) to some land behind his house because it would be safer (translation = I get to go back on Monday and dig another 100 holes). This will end up being better because they guy was truly worried that people would steal his coffee and he would have no income for this next year.

It doesn't make sense why people would even steal his coffee. They can't eat it. They don't know what to do with it. And they can't sell it because we're going to be the only buyers in the area. So basically they would just steal it for no reason. This is something that we've found quite a bit. People out here are generally just mean, especially in places that we don't have any friends or relationships established. People have no problem stealing, even if there seems to be no benefit. In all actuality, they are hurting themselves. We explained that if the coffee does well then we'll come back and they can all grow coffee, which is what we're hoping for, and then they can all make money off of it, but if they steal it then we won't know if it works and can't help them.

After all of this it worked out well. We ended up having to wait on the manure guy anyway, and we wouldn't have gotten to plant yesterday after he arrived. We needed dry manure, because wet manure gets hot as it dries and will burn the plants, and he assured us five times that the manure was dry. It turns out that when he got there it was incredibly fresh and wouldn't have worked. Our joke was that he was so late because he was waiting on the cow to poop so he could catch it, put it in the truck and drive over.

Long story short, we didn't plant yesterday and will be heading back out there for a long day on Monday. It worked out well though because we were able to spend the entire afternoon and eat dinner with this man and his family, and we'll have another opportunity to be with him on Monday. That really is what these projects are about. Sometimes I have to keep reminding myself of that. I want to just get them in the ground and have them up and running, but I should be more thankful for the times where I can spend talking to the people there. I have a feeling I'll need to be reminded about that again this upcoming Monday.

Basketball, Farming and Class

It seems like all I've done for the past couple of weeks are basketball, farming and class. To be honest, these past couple of weeks have been some of the busiest since I've been out here. Through the busyness, it has been a great time to meet a lot of people. I've had a group of friends from Oklahoma come out to teach basketball clinics and play in a few exhibition games. They ended up being one player short, which meant that I had to play. I'm starting to realize that I'm getting too old to schedule five basketball games on top of everything else I have to do in a given week. So I'm planning on taking a little bit of down time next week and trying to recuperate a little bit.

On top of basketball I've been doing a lot with our corn test plots. My roommate and I have spent a weekend out in a village with a farmer that lives all by himself. His wife was killed a few years back in a landslide, and he doesn't have any other family in the area. His daughter used to 'go out' a lot, but her husband didn't like it so he would beat her. Eventually he got drunk and broke her leg and now she walks with a very bad limp. I have seen her once, but because of everything they have moved to another village and now the man lives all by himself with no family around. One of the great benefits of our corn test plots is that I have a chance to go out and spend time with this guy. We also have finally gotten all five of our test plots in the ground; so no more corn planting! The next thing that we are about to do is coffee. We're going to try and get the seedlings this upcoming week so that we'll have everything ready to plant before the end of the month. We have everything lined up, but knowing things out here there will probably be setbacks.

The other thing that has been going on is a huge school performance. Our school is trying to become a university instead of just a teacher training college, so they are in the middle of the accreditation process. You would think that would mean most of the process would be based on academics and things like that, but somehow the major factor in the school becoming accredited is a performance in front of the officials. Because everyone thinks it is great that a foreigner can speak the local language, a few others and myself got up and sang in traditional clothing in front of the entire school. It was kind of fun, but I am glad to be finished with it. It earned me some major points with the local officials though.