Palmira 2

Its Saturday at 1:10, and I woke up at 12:30pm today. This is the latest ive woken up in a good 3 weeks. The only reason I woke up was because of the sound of the vuvuzelas (sp?) comming off the TV to signify the start if the game between Germany and Uruguay. If you would like to know I´m cheering for Uruguay, because if they win i´ll be able to say France tied to the third best team in the world, a small consolation.

Im definatly not here to talk about soccer, but that was the first thing on my mind, so now down to the real business. As I´ve said before we go to a place called Palmira once a week. Although INPRHU is still on holidays we still maintained our commitment to go to Palmira on Thursday. Our job was to help them construct a structure that would allow the people to plant seeds to grow vegetables to support themsevles. A construction was needed because the seeds had to be planted above ground becasue if the seeds were on the ground the seeds would be eaten by animals. I unfrotunetly dont have a picture of these structures because palmira isnt really the place for a camera. The structures closest resemblance was a table. I will take you through the building process.

The first step was to create a hole in the ground about half a meter in diameter and about 3-4 feet deep. We had to make 6 of these such holes. This was by far the hardest task of the day. This was made difficultdue to the fact that we were digging the hole with a metal rod that was kind of like a spear. I thankfully had help from the lady´s husband who was able to create the hole in half the time I was able to. By the time I finished my 3 holes I was responsible for my hands were bloodied and blistered, as were all of the volunteer´s hands that were helping.

The next step was to put a thick stick in each hole that were strong enough to use as a base of the structure. These sticks that were in the holes had to end in a ¨Y¨shape so that there can be sticks that would fit into the Y. I forgot to mention the holes in the ground created a rectangle shape. So after our sticks were put into the ground the structure now looked like:

Y Y Y

Y Y Y

Then we had to put sticks in to conect all the base sticks together:

Y--Y--Y
I I I
Y--Y--Y

Hopefully those crude drawings make sense to you. Next we had to nail them all in. Then to create a platform for the pots. We had to lay alot of sticks across the current structures. That would be alot of ¨I¨s. Since we were getting our sticks diretly off a tree some were too big, so I had to use a machete to cut them into the proper size.
So now our structure looks like:

Y--Y--Y
IIIIIIIII
Y--Y--Y

Now was one of the most interesting things I saw. As youve porlly read Ive been saying pots alot. But if youve read enough of my blog I like to leave interesting things to the end. The pots were actually old tires that were cut in half by a machete. These people are so poor they have to use old tires to plant their seeds. While me and the husband were working on the structure, the wife was digging a hole in the ground to make dirt to put in the ¨pots¨....GGOOOOOOOOAAAALLLLAAASSSSOOOOOOO (Uruguay just scored 2-1). Well ive just watched the replay, pretty nice goal but now ive lost my train of thought.

FUUUUUCCCKKK germany jsut scored, I think this blog is turning into my comentary on the world cup. So ill stop while I am ahead.

So back to my work in Palmira, this structure took us almost 3 hours to build. But it was an unbeleiveable feeling when we were finished, we could see tangible results of what we had worked to accomplish. Now in three months time, if everything goes well these people will have grown vegetables that they will be able to eat to support themselves. And we will continue to go to Palmira every thursday untill we leave in September.

That is one of the biggest goals for us in Palmira is teach the people to support themselves. It goes on the theory: give a man a fish he´ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish he´ll eat for life.

p.s if you dont know what palmira is read my previous post on it!