Harvest Time

It is officially corn harvest time here. To be more accurate, it was last few weeks. Four out of our five corn plots have been harvested. There was a little bit lost in translation with our local partners so a few of them have mixed up the different varieties of corn. It is hard for us to get solid data from those plots, but they can all tell us which kind grew the best, which is the most important thing for them. As I'm about to head into November I can already tell it is going to be a crazy month. The next few weeks are going to be spent in class or out in the villages. Yesterday afternoon I spent the day with one of our farmers after he had harvested everything. We ended up looking at corn for about ten minutes and then spent an hour just sitting around the fire having a great conversation. I constantly have to keep reminding myself that really is what it is all about. It is amazing to me how something as simple as corn can open so many doors. We still have four more villages to visit over the next couple of weeks and hopefully there will be similar experiences. Things here are starting to cool off some so I'll also be out taking care of our coffee and getting it ready for winter. Because the coffee is still young and we're not sure how it will do with the cold here we're going to take some precautions to make sure it doesn't freeze. It shouldn't be a lot of extra work, but it will take some time. Between the agricultural things I also have a friend coming out to visit for a few days this next week. We were going to try and go skiing up in Tibet (yeah... we can do that here), but it is still too early in the season. Instead I think I'm going to put him to work and go out and winterize our coffee. I figure that since he's stuck in a city of a couple of million all year round he would enjoy some time working out in the mountains. I'm also going to do some traveling over Thanksgiving. I have a little bit of vacation saved up so my roommate and I are going to travel through South East Asia before he heads back to the Philippines. He used to work on a coffee plantation in Laos, so we'll be spending a few days there looking at their operation and enjoying some VERY fresh cups of coffee. There are also a few more stops on the trip, but I'll save the details for later.