Rainy Season

It is rainy season here. Usually it lasts from mid-May until the end of August. Last summer I was here too and it rained, but there was not nearly as much rain as there has been this year. I think that over the past month there have maybe been two clear days; that is until this week. The rain has finally started to clear out some, and that means that I'm getting to go outside more. The rain really does change life out here. Back in the U.S. if it rains you just get in your car and deal with it. It might slow you down some and may inconvenience you some, but the rain isn't all that big of a thing. Here everyone has bikes or walks and all social activity is done outside. So when it rains here it really changes my day to day life. This past month it has been hard to connect with people, play basketball and go out to villages.

The rain cleared out on Monday though and I've been able to go to several villages this past week. Monday I went out to the south end of town to fertilize some corn with a couple of friends. I think that field is cursed. We planted it about a month and a half ago and it poured down rain the entire time we were out there. So when we went back on Monday the skies were clear and we left all of our rain gear in the truck. About halfway through fertilizing the field the clouds came rolling down the ridge (which we were right under). My friend ran back to the car to grab the rain gear, but it was raining when he was only 2/3 of the way there. I got soaked and spent the next couple of hours soaking wet.

Monday was the last rainy day here though. Tuesday I spent the entire day with friends out in the village. We had a great time getting to catch up with some people out there. I also went out yesterday too. My next big project for this upcoming semester is to try and find a location and set up an ag training center for locals here. It will be a place where we can have a few classrooms, land to try out new farming techniques and some places to raise pigs and other animals. Ideally we'll be able to bring locals in, train them, and then send them back out to their villages. So my roommate and I have been going out once a week specifically to talk to people to see if we can find some land to rent. We were out doing that yesterday and my roommate got a phone call from a friend in his class. His friend's family owns a big orphanage out here and he wanted us to come out and do some things with the kids for a few hours. It was a lot of fun and there are about three hundred kids there. They are wanting me to come back and teach basketball once every few weeks, so I think I might be spending a little more time out there. I'm sure I'll get some good pictures over the next few months from being out there.

Way Out in the Village

So random story for the past couple of weeks:

I was out yesterday with a friend and we were scoping out a fairly remote village. The last time that I know anyone had even been out that direction was 2001, and that was basically just to plot it on the map so we know it exists. Actually as far as anyone had ever been was the larger village, and we went about two hours further than that. We did stop in the larger village for lunch on our trip out though. When we stopped for lunch we got out of the truck and immediately these two local guys came up and wanted to talk to us. We kind of figured that since we were so far out they were just amazed to see white people, but it turns out one of the guys was on his way home from college. He had been staying in the city I live in for a few days with his aunt and was just now heading back to see his family for a month. It also turns out that he spoke good English, which also never happens out in the village. So when we met this guy he started talking to us, mentioned that he was going to the same village we were going to and asked if we could give him a ride so he could practice his English. So we said sure and took him to lunch before hitting the road.

While we were at lunch we started talking and it turns out that his aunt lives in a house right behind my apartment complex. I told him that he should come over the next time that he is in town, and he said that he likes to go to my apartment complex to play basketball. He said, "I went there a couple of days ago and there was this foreigner playing basketball." Since I'm one of two foreigners in my apartment complex (and the other one wasn't playing basketball that day) I filled him in that was me. He was pretty amazed. I told him that maybe it was a divine appointment.

The rest of the day out was good. It was a couple more hours out to his village. We had some great conversations along the way. He also lives next to an ancient stone village built into the side of the mountain. It is supposedly a big tourist attraction, but after having been there I've realized that it is WAY too far out of the way for anyone to go to. We went to see it and it took a five hour drive (two of which were on dirt mountain roads) and then another half hour to hike down to the village because there was no road. It was kind of interesting but I think if I'd had been going out there just to see it I'd have been VERY disappointed after the long ride.

My friend wanted us to spend the night with him (which we almost had to do because it was getting so late), but since we had things to do today back in town we needed to leave. He has my number and knows where I live so hopefully we'll get together and play some basketball this next month when he is heading back to school.

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.

The End of May

I realize that I'm only getting around to posting one entry this month. Sorry about that. I was gone during the middle of the month. My family came out to visit so I flew up to Beijing and I spent a week with them and some friends that live in the area. We then spent a full week out here. So I haven't had a lot of time to sit down and write.

The trip to Beijing was a lot of fun. We saw all of the big sights and I got to eat some good Mexican food. Once we were back in this part of the world we traveled around some and saw a lot of the local things here. After everyone went home I've been busy with class and trying to get more corn planted. We have four test plots in the ground and are planting one more later this week. Then it is on to coffee... We have almost everything together for the coffee test plots, except for the minor detail of finding someone who will sell us coffee seedlings. I've talked to a few people and I think we're on the right path to getting it all together. Hopefully that will come together in the next week and a half so we can start planting towards the end of June.

The ag projects have opened a lot of doors for us already. In one of the villages we have planted corn for three years, and every time we go out there people welcome us into their homes and love to talk to us. In one of our other villages it is the first time that we have been out there. We are working with a man who lives alone because he wife was killed several years back when a boulder fell on her. He loves having us come over for company, and because we have to check the corn every two to three weeks, we have a lot of chances to sit around the fire with him. My roommate and I just spent this last weekend at his house. And, while the barking dogs and flea that lived in our beds were a little annoying, it was a great weekend out in the village.

This upcoming week we have about ten college students coming out from Oklahoma. Most of them are basketball players and we're all going to be playing basketball tournaments and teaching clinics for the next two weeks. On top of this I'll be planting corn and visiting some villages. It'll be a busy two weeks, but it is always fun when people come out for a while. Hopefully they'll be able to get out to some villages and really experience life here.

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.