Reviving the Viveiro and Working with Palhas

Yesterday's afternoon job ended up being in the garden, otherwise known as the viveiro (in Portuguese). As we noted in our original tour, the place has been a bit neglected lately due to the main garden steward having surgery and his wife (the co-leader of the garden) needing to take care of him.  Both of them are fine now but he is still resting, so we made a big push to get things back in order to be ready for their return.  

It took lots of raking and scraping to get things back to a state of order and we lifted and loaded all of the debris out of the way so that the rows are clear again and the pathways are navigable.  It looked like a huge job when we started but it really only took about two hours.  We then reestablished the prep area for seedling bags and started stuffing little black bags full of dirt.  Students from trips here in past years will remember this process of bag stuffing, as some of them spent hours and hours (maybe days) doing this tedious and meticulous job.  These tightly stuffed plastic bags will become the incubators for new starts of desirable native trees.  Though the job is monotonous, it gives us a chance to sit together in a close circle and laugh and talk in ways that aren’t always possible when we are doing some of our manual labor.  

We didn’t quite finish all of the jobs but we decided to stop before darkness came, partially to help us get home on the forest path and partially to give us a chance to run down and jump into the river.  Some of us are getting the hang of washing some of our clothing while we are still wearing it, to make the challenge of hand washing all of our heavily-soiled clothes a little less daunting.  (The sudden cloudbursts of rain are a secondary challenge to our laundry lives, making it hard to ever find a way to get something thoroughly washed and dried.)

We talked together about our responses to the hard work we are doing and were a little surprised to learn how invigorating and energizing most of us find it to be.  Even more surprising: we pretty much collectively find the work to be fun.  A few of us talked about how nice it felt to spend our time doing something meaningful for us and for this community.  Even the moving of the rocks felt really good to us.  For some it was a personal challenge to lift and carry some of the rocks where they needed to go.  For others it was rewarding to take up this burden to spare the locals from having to do it themselves.  For still others, it was satisfying to see a big pile in one place disappear while another pile in a more desirable place took form.  And for just a few, it was the first time we had done this kind of work, and the novelty of it was entertaining.  All in all, we gained a new appreciation for work in general and manual labor in particular, and we all declared that we want our eventual professional work lives to feel the way our days here have felt so far.  

We then transitioned into recognizing a new member of the Order of the Purple Bike: Nina.  Nina is a quirky little ball of light who is almost always happy and positive.  For our friendly soccer game yesterday, she took full responsibility for learning how to work the bubble machine that we brought along because she had heard that the kids here think it is incredibly cool.  So, she figured out how to make bubble stuff out of the soap that was available to us and got it cranking on battery power.  As predicted, the kids went nuts.  

Also at the soccer game, she kindly stepped off the field to allow others on the sidelines to get some play time.  Not everyone was willing to give up a spot, so the subs really appreciated Nina’s recognition that they wanted to play. 

In general, she is a great motivator with a great attitude, who brings up the level of commitment and happiness in all that she does.  She also makes faces that are quite difficult to read but mostly hilarious and she additionally has a pretty impressive ability to make weird sounds and/or sound effects that can get most of us cracking up pretty quickly.

 Congratulations to Nina!
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And now we are on to Tuesday, when we woke up and painfully put on long pants and long sleeved shirts to go into the forest in search of baby palm fronds called "palhas" (pronounced PAHL-yahs).  These special fronds are the crux of the thatched roofs that protect us throughout the community here and the ones we are seeking will make a new roof for the planting/shade area of the garden.

To get them, some locals had to do some recon to figure out where there was a good supply, which turned out to be about a twenty minute boat ride away.  We ventured into the forest along a path but then cut off the path to find the bright green spears that turn out to be newly growing palm trees.  Our local guides were fearless in heading toward the points in straight lines and whacking them with machetes, as we formed bucket lines to make piles all over the forest floor so that we could collect them later.  No regrets whatsoever about the long pants and long sleeves.

It started pouring at one point but we were under such a thick canopy that we didn't even feel it at all.  It was amazing.

The locals kept going and going and going and we kept following and trying to keep our piles in lines we could find again, which was much easier said than done.  Once the piles had accumulated sufficiently, the locals pulled down some vines to tie them together in bunches of 30.  And as it turns out, 30 tightly wound palm fronds are actually quite heavy.

We ended up with 26 piles of 30 fronds, which is about half the amount we need.  We loaded them out of the forest, into the boat, back out of the boat, and onto the beach.  We came home HUNGRY and tired from a long morning.

But the palhas still needed to be "broken," which involves shaking them furiously until they start to open up, then taking each individual "leaf" and snapping it partway (but not all the way) off and twisting it down so that all of the parts hang straight down in the same direction.  It is a bit of an art and we weren't all exactly naturals, but we got the hang of it over time.  We snapped and twisted and snapped and twisted and probably didn't even get to half of them before darkness started to fall.

We ran and jumped in the water (for the second time today for many of us) and got ready for   a late dinner.  We haven't had our purple bike ceremony yet, so we aren't ready to announce.

You may be surprised to learn that tomorrow we are heading off on a little excursion to see some of the other local communities.  The SMC groups always do these boat trips, but not always right at this point in the month.  But this is the time that worked for the boat, the captain, the cooks, and the community, so it's the time that we will go.  We are likely to have difficulty with our connection during the next three days, though we will do the best we can.

We will visit one community where we will do a short hike up to a vista point in the "primary forest" surrounded by nut trees that are hundreds of feet tall.  We are also visiting a community that specializes in basketry and then we are visiting an indigenous community that has recently joined the collective that our community participates in.  We will post on Saturday after accumulating photos and videos during our trip.  If we can post sooner, we will.  There are a few backfilled photos going up right now that you might want to scroll back and see.

Wish us well on our voyage!