I fed the turtle some bread
Watching a parade. They start Independence Day celebrations early in the week.
Look at all the cute little kids!
There go the queens of the school
Lots of little dancers
They are pretty beautiful
And there's always a band
A nun!!! I love nuns!
"Valley West Mall" in Berlín
Looking at clothes
Shopping, anyone?
Salvadoran apples. Very small.
Mmmm, dried fish
Yucca
Lots of supplies.
Starting to make the care packages
In each package: body soap, laundry soap, 1 lb. of beans, 4 toothbrushes, toothpaste, 100 pills of acetaminophen, 50 tablets of antacids, 38 band-aids, and a little note all wrapped up in a towel
The finished product
Making piles
Cecilia was helping us
Lots of packages
Blanca and Mauricio helped too
Gathering the supplies
Putting it all together
Deciding how to tie the twine around the towels
Lunch break: pasta, chicken, pipian, guisquil, and carrots
Preparing for work at the milpa (corn field) with my cuma (large, curved machete)
Riding in the back of the truck to the milpa in Alejandria
The roads aren't so great anywhere in the cantons
You can see how these dirt "walls" near the roads combined with rain make landslides very common. This is why retaining walls are so important.
The roads get really muddy
We parked the truck and walked about a mile to the milpa
Blanca leading the way
Most cornfields are on a steep slope
The valley below
In the distance you can see La Geo (the geothermal plant)
You can barely make out the trail. You can also see someone's cornfield
Lynn and Kathy walking down the steep trail
Planting and harvesting corn is no easy task
Pausing for a moment along the trail with my cuma
We reached our milpa and headed down
Lynn stayed at the top to shuck corn
Alejandro showed us the proper way to bend the corn stalks
Here I am cutting the weeds
Learning to gently bend the corn stalks using the cuma
Taking out the weeds
We only worked about an hour
The butterflies loved the jocotes (kind of fruit) on the ground
A greenish butterfly I saw
So many beautiful creatures
It was a lot of work
Tossing ears of corn to each other
Blanca heading back up the slope
Alejandro carried one bag on his shoulder
Blanca carried back the other bag on her head without using her hands
Lynn told Alejandro she needed to learn how to carry a bag
Lynn carrying the bag of corn
I could only let go for a few seconds
1 comment:
I can't believe you did all of this in one day. The parade looked like fun, I love all the costumes. It is amazing they can plant and grow corn on those mountain sides like that!
Post a Comment