Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Children's Garden

Children's Garden

Work in the Children's Garden is full tilt right now. The new volunteers are very excited about making stone walls. The bulldozer came through and although the area is not complete, it is looking good so far. The bulldozer has already dug a cistern and 4 out of the 5 levels. On two of the levels, we removed all the stones, raked it level, and planted grass seed. The current stone wall is very impressive. Unfortunately, we still have quite a few more stone walls to make and we're running out of stones.

Carlton and I have taken a ton of cuttings and right now the shadehouse is at capacity! All of the cuttings are going to be put in the Children's Garden. In addition, we just ordered about 50 bags of potting soil and another hundred pots to take even more cuttings.

After about a week of no rain, it poured for the whole weekend and we ran out of water! Oddly enough, the holding tank that we use most of the water out of, does not collect any rainwater. We have to pump it from another cistern (that does collect rainwater) into the holding tank. I was standing by the side of the house last week when I heard gushing water, which immediately made me run outside because it's the only running water that we have. Due to a broken pipe, we lost half of the water in the holding tank. The water actually lasted us about a week, which was good. However, the weekend was so overcast that we had very little power from the solar panels (hard to imagine in a tropical country) and it went out frequently at night. The weather is back to normal now, which is a blessing. It has finally gotten a little bit cooler at night and in the mornings, which makes it nicer to work in.

The new volunteers are all very nice and they're settling in all right. I've been learning a few new cooking recipes as well as sayings. One of my favorite recipes I actually learned from Carlton (the garden ranger) which is plantain pancakes. Plantains are one of my favorite foods to eat here, along with all the tropical fruit in the garden (passionfruit is in season right now!)

Tonight is trivial pursuit night with SECAR which is the archeological group on the island. They want to see what life is like at the garden so we've invited them up for a match. We only have the genius edition of the game so I hope that the game moves at least a little bit. It should be fun regardless. All the volunteers think that Julia and I have an advantage because we're American and it's an American version, but little do they know I'm horrible at trivia!

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