Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Donde es la Finca?

Sorry for such a long time since our last post. We were an hours hitch-hike away from the internet.
Last you may have heard from us was that we were heading north to Ecuador in order to volunteer at an ecological farm in the Amazon jungle. We were there for the past three ½ weeks. We considered staying for the remainder of our trip, however considering some of the circumstances at the “farm” (such as the fact that it wasn’t a farm at all, they weren’t really growing anything aside from the Amazon jungle engulfing the place). The current residents on the farm have big plans for the place, but no funds and little experience or knowledge of how to make it happen. We decided to move along, in fact, we are currently at the coast.
Our first few days on the farm we spent our time working in the kitchen and making saunas for the numerous guest who came for a holiday weekend. While working in the kitchen we filled buckets and buckets of food waste and quickly recognized that their current system of composting was just making a pile for at least a years worth of food left to rot out in the sun, smelling foul and attracting all sorts of insects. They have plans to begin farming there so we saw an opportunity to help set up a composting system by building a new structure to house the compost area and set up a system for some effective composting. With knowledge that we already had (Cassie taught a composting unit for her second grade class) along with a bit of internet research we spent the better part of two weeks building a compost structure and developing a system to be implemented at the farm making use of their kitchen waste. Before we left we hosted a “workshop” in order to explain the composting process to the people who live at the farm.
So now we are at a chill beach town I am getting caught up on school stuff and preparing for the end of the term. We are hoping to volunteer at another farm that some friends recommended to us which is here near the coast.
Time is going fast it won’t be long before we are back in Oregon.
Much Love,
Brent and Cassie

The new structure during the construction in process




large bins for the different stages of the composting proccess



The Final Product



We found a sweet swimming hole that we hit up at least once a day.



I feel like Tarzan here



The bugs are vicious in the jungle. At one point Cassie and I counted over 400 bites on my legs and feet alone.



There are big ones too



and mossy ones!

1 comment:

  1. Hey you two!
    It's great to see your smiling faces and hear your stories. We're thinking of you often and are realizing that if we are going to see you, we need to make it happen. Let us know your plans! The only thing to make this trip better would be good friends. Hope y'all are living every moment and having a blast!
    .Much Love.
    Col and Kristin

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