In cooperation with Healing Hands, this week Mission Lazarus hosted a drip irrigation seminar for some men in the area. The guy teaching works for Healing Hands and has travelled to over 85 different countries. He was pretty interesting, and knows a lot about irrigation. Anyway, this guy is from Tennessee and doesn't speak Spanish, so I had the privelege of translating for him a few days this week. I learned more than the average person would probably ever want to know about composting, digging raised beds, and drip irrigation.For example: To build a compost heap, there are several principle things that you need, such as organic materials, water, bacteria, heat, and pressure. To start, you build your base, about 2 meters by 2 meters, and build your first layer with coarse materials, such as small sticks or bamboo or something like that. Then, you cover with a layer of palm leaves, or some such thing. Pour on a layer of water, then continue to cover this with some type of large leaf, like a banana leaf. Continue with some mud, perhaps with a little manure mixed in, throw on some food scraps, maybe a little more water, some light material like green grass, or sawdust, add water, and continue to add layers...alternating between heavy layers like mud and manure, and light layers like grass and sawdust. It's important to remember that green grass is better than yellow because it's still alive and still produces certain bacterias that help the heap to decompose.And that's leaving out the details.....

-por Emily

In cooperation with Healing Hands, this week Mission Lazarus hosted a drip irrigation seminar for some men in the area. The guy teaching works for Healing Hands and has travelled to over 85 different countries. He was pretty interesting, and knows a lot about irrigation. Anyway, this guy is from Tennessee and doesn't speak Spanish, so I had the privelege of translating for him a few days this week. I learned more than the average person would probably ever want to know about composting, digging raised beds, and drip irrigation.For example: To build a compost heap, there are several principle things that you need, such as organic materials, water, bacteria, heat, and pressure. To start, you build your base, about 2 meters by 2 meters, and build your first layer with coarse materials, such as small sticks or bamboo or something like that. Then, you cover with a layer of palm leaves, or some such thing. Pour on a layer of water, then continue to cover this with some type of large leaf, like a banana leaf. Continue with some mud, perhaps with a little manure mixed in, throw on some food scraps, maybe a little more water, some light material like green grass, or sawdust, add water, and continue to add layers...alternating between heavy layers like mud and manure, and light layers like grass and sawdust. It's important to remember that green grass is better than yellow because it's still alive and still produces certain bacterias that help the heap to decompose.And that's leaving out the details.....

-por Emily

If you haven't ever travelled to Honduras, you should try to make the trip sometime. It is simply a beautiful country. Especially now, during the rainy season, everything is so green!! I love it...it is very calming to be able to look around and see nothing but green grass and trees and mountains. The above picture is my front yard. Yes, it is quite big and beautiful, and our house is kind of out in the middle of nowhere, but it's great - especially if you love bugs and mice. We also have recently discovered that we have a fairly small water tank, which adds an extra element to the Honduran Adventure. Just the other day, after a torrential downpour, we all arrived home to discover that we had no water - that means no drinking, no showering, no flushing, nada. So, another intern and I set out on a search of the guy that turns on the pump (we found out later that we can turn on the pump ourselves, which makes things a bit easier). Anyway, everything was muddy and slushy and, of course, living on a ranch there was lots of horse and cow poop mixed in with the mud, so you don't know what you're stepping in. First, we squeezed through a narrow opening in the barbed wire fence around our house, then headed down alongside the chicken and turkey coop, which had a nice aroma, and then we slid down a muddy slope to the gravel road. We went about 20 feet, then had to wade through a river, up some more road, and we arrived at our destination. Needless to say, at that point we were smelly, wet, and muddy, but we had a great time!!

-por Emily