| View Blog
|
| Flor de Pochote - The Ecological Farm
|
|
|
Sunday, June 25-29, 2008
The Eco Farm
So far, it has been a fairly pleasant Spanish learning vacation, training for my soon mission to the people of Las Salinas. There have been bumps in the road but nothing serious. Last Friday afternoon I got the dreaded Montezuma's Revenge, very serious. Some of you know of this traveler's nightmare. Diarrhea like I have never experienced before, I'll spare you the details. During this time of emergency and agony and weakness I had to move out of a gorgeous colonial house in very nice city to a farm up in the hills overlooking Laguana de Masaya, a lake inside of an extinct volcano. I'm staying in a cabina at the bottom of a ravine located in a constantly wet forest. My classmate, living in the other half of a duplex cabin, and I have to climb a steep hill to get to the main house and school. In my weakness I have had to stop for rest four times before I struggle, breathlessly to the top. The facilities here are way better than you would expect to find in this area of poverty, they are definitely 1st world. The owner, Ové, of Flor de Pochote is from Denmark. He and his wife have built a working ecological farm over the last ten years that they use for research and reforestation projects. Ové is a botanist that has planted a large variety of trees that he has labeled and categorized in his computer and published world-wide; check out his web site: www.flordepochote.com. He is also beginning consultation work for a large Norwegian Company that will be planting trees on 10,000 acres of land in another part of the country. They need his knowledge to know what types of trees to plant and how to go about it and they have dozens of unanswered questions that need to be resolved. He told us that they given him plenty of freedom for research and development because nothing much is known about this tropical region working with volcanic soils and different micro climates environments.
They have three children who mix with the employee's kids real well, they speak Spanish and not Danish and dislike their Saturday English classes. It is a happy place and the family and the staff are going overboard mixing up natural remedies concocted from their own fruit trees for me to force down. Rosario, his always smiling wife, just brought me some warm tea made from the leaves of a casábama tree and earlier, when I put down the long handled ax that I was swinging, cutting firewood, I was handed a large glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice mixed with alka-seltzer and honey to help prevent me from becoming dehydrated.
The school is predictably getting more difficult and demanding. Arlen our teacher has to get up at 3:30 am to be able to catch and to transfer buses and then to take the moto, a three-wheeled covered motor scooter, in time to arrive at the farm for five hours of teaching classes, then return in the same way to her own city. She has a family to take care of in Granada. She was disappointed because I didn't do my homework last night. But today I was able concentrate a little, though. I gets dark here around 6:30 pm and the lighting at night is poor and strains my eyes so it's hard to study here and I have been weakened by the diarrhea so much that I go to bed before 9 pm.
I have to hand wash my only pair of jeans and they get dirty quickly working on the farm and they are hard to dry because of some much rain here in the high hills. I finally found a pair of jeans to buy in town, that should help my laundry situation a lot. Yesterday, we cleaned out the slimy shallow pool that the geese swim and wash in and cleaned the corral, too. It was fun preparing the organic feed and feeding the livestock. Today, it was chainsawing, chopping and using the machete to make leña, special firewood used for open-fire cooking of pollo (young organic range-fed chickens). Tomorrow, we learn how to cook a typical nicaraguenses dish and Friday about coffee growing and how to fight insects with natural means not using pesticides. We will also take a walking tour of an agricultural collective farm and visit individual families in their impoverished houses to talk with them. We are always warmed by smiling friendly people with open hearts and open hands everywhere we go who will give you anything they have. They sure don't want to be poor but they handle it very well. In a strange way I envy the peaceful and loving kindness that surrounds their hard lives.
|
|
Posted by Spreader on 2008-07-04 23:32:06 | Rating: | Views: 27
|
| |
|
|
