The End of Summer

So summer has come and gone out here. To be honest, I'm kind of thankful that it is over. I'm getting tired of monsoon season. For the last few weeks the rain has come and gone, but it always seems to arrive at the most inconvenient times. Here lately it seems to rain only on the days where I try to go out to the village and from about 5-7pm (the hours I try to go and play basketball). So I'm looking forward to a little more sunshine. As strange as it is I'm also looking forward to going back to school. I have a lot more conversations these days, but at the same time I feel like my language has kind of plateaued over the past month or so.

Even through the rain there have been some good things happen this week. I went out with my friend that is studying language with me and we spent some time in Old Town. We went way past all the tourist shops to where locals actually live and spent some time talking to some old ladies. There was a group of people washing vegetables in a stream so we stopped to talk for a while. One older lady was very talkative so I talked to her for about twenty minutes. Most of the conversation revolved around how she thought Jared was my wife when we walked up. It is amazing how a 6'1'' 175lb. white guy can be mistaken for a girl because he has long hair. It didn't stop me from making fun of him though. Quickly after she found out that he in fact was not my wife the conversation took the same turn that all conversations out here with old women; she told me that she had a daughter my age.

I've also had some time to reconnect with some friends over the past few weeks. Many of them have just graduated from college and have been very involved with their jobs. I guess the newness of work is starting to wear off and they are finding time to go out and do things once again. Hopefully this fall we'll all have more time to go out. School also hasn't started yet. My school is moving to a new campus and the mayor decided to make an announcement that classes would be at the new campus this fall. Well, construction was delayed with rainy season so the campus isn't finished and there is mud everywhere. Because of this they pushed the start of the semester back a few weeks and then announced that only half of the school (fortunately not the foreign students) will be attending the new campus. So it is a win-win situation. I won't have a forty-minute bike ride to class every day and I have an extra two weeks of summer.

Party!

So we've just finished having a party out here. I had this random thought on Tuesday morning that I should invite all of my friends that I play basketball with to come over and cook up some American food. I wasn't sure if anyone would actually come, but I figured it was worth a shot. So most of this week I've been going out to the basketball court to play ball and talk up this party. Like with anything involving a bunch of twenty year old guys, if you mention free food there will be a decent turn out. We had fourteen guys show up, so it was pretty good.

The actual night of the party was a little hectic though. I had been getting things together for most of the day. It poured down rain all day, so that made for several fun bike rides across town. Everyone was supposed to come over at 7pm, so I fired up the grill in the house at around 5:30. Surprise, no gas. It turns out they have been working on the main gas pipeline in our apartment complex and shut it off for a few days (starting at 5pm today). So I managed to go and buy a large propane bottle and rig it up to my stove in the kitchen. By the time I got home from that there were ten guys waiting at my door; go figure they all show up an hour early. So most of my night was spent cooking, and they all took off early and at exactly the same time, but I think it was a great 'door opening' opportunity. I actually think we're going to try and have a cookout once a month or so. I'll make sure and write about how the next one goes.

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.