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.

Corn and Coffee

Well we haven't actually started planting corn or coffee yet, but we're working on it. Actually it is already becoming more work than I was hoping for. Finding test plot locations has been kind of tricky. I don't think that corn is going to be a problem, however the coffee thing is ending up being a lot harder to find good locations for. For good coffee you want high elevation (which we have) and no frost (which some places have here) and good soil (which other places have). The hard part is finding places that have all three. We're still looking but the clock is starting to tick down. We wouldn't need to plant the coffee until this summer, but if we don't talk to some farmers about it soon they will have already planted things on the land. So hopefully we'll be talking to some guys in the next couple of weeks. My roommate and I are also going to head down far south to the border to help out some other people with their coffee planting. It'll be a good opportunity to learn some things and to help some people out. So that is really about it. The past couple of weeks have been busy with traveling out to villages and when I'm in town trying to keep up with class and other responsibilities. A friend and I have been meeting with some local guys for the past couple of months. Things are going well and two of them are actually going swimming this next week. There are still a couple of other guys in the group who are dragging their feet on some things, but they are asking a lot of good questions. So in looking ahead for this next month I'm probably going to be out trying to find some test plot areas and planting a lot of corn. We've got to plant about six different fields, so that'll take up some time. It'll be good to be out in the villages though. I get sick of being in the city after a few days. Actually I think it is mostly because of the traffic here. There aren't a lot of cars, but no one pays attention to anything so every day I'm dodging someone who almost runs me over. Village life is much safer, with the exception of the occasional parasite. I'll take a parasite over traffic most days. I'll keep everyone posted on the village trips over the next month.

Going to the Farm

So I know it has been a few weeks since I've posted something on here. School has officially started back up; however I have only been to three classes in the past two and a half weeks. The first week of class I came down with a little case of the Giardia, so I wasn't doing a whole lot outside of my apartment. I think it was something that I picked up while I was in the village but it took about a week to finally catch up with me. Anyway, it knocked me out for a few days. I was better by the end of the week, which is good because I needed to go to class, and I went on a nine hour road trip on that Saturday. I was starting to worry that I was still going to be sick during the trip, but I was completely better by then. Last week was spent down on a farm doing some ag training. This is the second time that I've been, and I really enjoy the trips down there. This time we focused on methods to raising chickens, corn and a little bit about soybeans. It is a huge skill to know these kinds of things out here because everyone is a farmer in the villages. So we've applied for a grant that is going to pay us to establish corn test plots in villages. Over the next few weeks we are going to have to set up these test plots and then spend the summer going out and checking them and collecting data. All of this means a lot of time out in the village for me. I'm actually looking forward to it. We're also looking for a few good places to establish come coffee test plots. My filipino roommate is sort of a coffee growing expert, so we're going to try and get that all going in the next couple of months. It is a lot to coordinate, so we'll see how it all goes. Anyway, that's about all that has been going on out here. I'll be traveling to about half a dozen villages over the next couple of weeks to try and get these test plot locations squared away. Other than that it is going to class and trying to keep up with my normal responsibilities in town. It'll be busy, but it is fun.

Back from the village (again)

So I've just realized that I've spent most of my Winter Break out in villages. I'm not going to complain, it is more fun than staying in town. Actually I was about to go crazy from boredom before I went out to this last village. Chinese New Year here is something that you just have to see to believe. Even being in a smaller city, there were fireworks for a solid hour before and after midnight. Actually, there were fireworks the entire week before and after New Year too. There were a few times where I felt like I was in a war zone. All of the streets were deserted and you would randomly hear fireworks going off in the distance. Everywhere closed on Saturday and didn't open back up until the end of the next week. So I decided to go and visit my friend in a village for the week. I tried to leave on Monday, but when I went to the bus station, after talking to the driver earlier that morning, I found out the driver went home because not very many people showed up for the bus and he didn't want to drive out on the holiday. So I didn't leave until Tuesday. The week in the village was a lot of fun. I think I met about half of the village while I was there. One day we went to around nine houses and I ate at six of them. By the fifth meal of the afternoon I felt pretty miserable. There is only so much blood sausage and liver that you can eat in a day. It was a great trip though. The village sits around 2,000 meters elevation and it is in the middle of one of the deepest gorges in the world. On both sides of the village there are two 6,000 meter mountains. While I was there we got the only rain of the winter and there was a ton of snow on the mountains. It made for an incredible view. I've also got a few invitations to come back, and hopefully this will be a possible location for some coffee test plots.

Back from Vacation

I'm back from a week and a half down in Thailand. We talked to a few friends who are working down there and were able to find some inexpensive places to stay during the trip. It was a lot of fun. We had a place that was right on the beach and were short walk from some of the best rock climbing in the world. The island that we were staying on is only accessible by boat so there were no cars or bikes or anything like that. It was a fun week. I got to do some rock climbing, SCUBA diving (I was about five feet away from a 7-foot leopard shark), kayaking, riding elephants, and some other fun stuff. It was a good week. It has been a little bit of a shock coming back. I am definitely glad to be back, but it seems a little colder then when I left. Spring should be right around the corner though. This next week is Chinese New Year and I hear that it is going to be a huge party. Most everything will be closed down for a about a week, so I'm thinking I need to get an invite out to stay with a friend in a village or otherwise I'm going to starve. One of my friends has given me an invite so I think I'm going to try and stay with him for a few days. I'll make sure and keep you all posted.

Back from the Village

Well I survived my time out in the village. It was actually a really good trip. The village leader that I am staying with is a guy in his mid-40's. Usually he is out chopping down trees, so I didn't get to spend a lot of time with him this week. His father is the former village head and he and I spent most of our time together. He is a great older guy. I can see why they are the leaders of this village because, as opposed to most people out here, they are busy most of the time. Them being busy was great for me because I had things to do almost every day. Most mornings we would wake up and eat breakfast at around 9:30 and then go out around 10am. It sounds kind of late, which it is, but the reason is because we were so high in the mountains that the sun wouldn't come up until then. And it was REALLY cold if the sun wasn't up. So during the morning we would basically hike a little over a mile to the other side of the mountain so we could find some trees to chop down. Uncle He, the former village leader, and I would chop down a few trees, strip off the branches from the top, tie them all together and then haul them home so we could feed the goats with them. And then most days we would go out and do the exact same thing in the afternoon. It is kind of a lot of work just to feed some goats. I didn't mind though. I got to chop down a few trees and it gave me something to do. Most of the time village life is pretty boring, but this week was good because it was different. I was also stretched with language quite a bit. I would read some in the afternoons and Uncle He would always ask what I was reading. It turns out he can't read so I had to tell him about it. There were a few times where I had to use some charades, but overall I think he understood what I was talking about. I've posted the video from week three from our village wedding trip here. This next week Jared and I are taking off for a little vacation down South. Nothing like going from about 9,000-feet in the cold mountains to sunny warm beaches.