Monday 21st September

Monday I woke up bright and early after a long weekend of sleeping in. Today was my first day in the Lecheria (Dairy Farm). When I got there at 6am, I introduced myself to a couple of the workers and told them this was my new place for two weeks. They were happy I was there and put me straight to work. First I worked with a man named Mauricio. We shoveled the cow food into the food box thing that the cows ate out of. The food consisted of chopped up pineapple and bananas. It looked horrible but smelled really nice. It was a pleasant to smell this instead of the manure while working. After shoveling that into the huge eating bin, I went to my next project. Mauricio gave me a white plastic apran and introduced me to my next instructor. His name was Junior; he was in charge of milking the cows and running the machines to milk them. He told me the process on what I needed to do to milk the cows. We were located in the barn in the milking station. The best way to describe it is; there are two sides with four slots on either side. There are doors for each slot that can be opened and closed by sliding them into the slots and out of them. Junior and I were located in a lower section in the middle, looking up at the bellies of the cows. Over our head are medal pipes that take that milk to the big holding cylinder, and other tubes for the sucking machines. The milking machines had four suckers for the four nipples on the cow. The machine was like a vacuum, but sucked two nipples one second and the other the following second to create a rhythm. First, four cows enter on either side and then we close the doors so each of them are separated. Second Mauricio checks the numbers on the cow’s ears and then brings in the baby who has the matching number of that specific cow in the slot. Then Junior and I start with one side. First we wash each of the four cow’s nipples and make sure there’s no dirt on them. Second we open a small side door to let the baby put its head into the slot and suck on its mother’s nipples. This gets the milk flowing out of the nipples. Then after a minute, we close the side door and then wash the nipples again, and dry them off with news paper. After that we put on the machine that starts sucking the milk out of the cow. Once the cow is finished, we take each of the machines off the cow and open the doors. Then we do the same process on the other side with other four cows. While were working on the other side, four more cows are let into the first side. One side takes about 5 to 7mins, and there are about 60 or 70 cows. I think it’s a bunch of fun and the people are super nice. After the whole, milking processes is done, we clean the whole place and spray and brush it down with water. Also we clean out the tubes and the machines and make sure everything is sterile. After that whole process, I ate lunch with the men and tried to understand what they were saying. It was extremely difficult to understand them because most of them talk in slang and slur most of there words. After lunch we washed 21 metal milk jugs that were used for transporting the milk to the cheese and milk building. After we cleaned them, we filled them up with milk and loaded them onto the truck. We drove to the cheese and milk building and then had to take them off the truck and carry them one by one to a scale to weigh them. It would take two people to carry one jug. A man from the cheese and milk building helped me carry them and then another man recorded the weight of each jug. After that we would poor the milk of each jug into a huge tub that was used to make cheese. The average milk jug weighed 47 kgs. That is about 103 pounds!!!!!! After dropping off all the milk, we went back to the Lecheria to bring the cows to there field and then the day was over. After work I ran into Dadine, a friend I meet the previous week. She invited me to come see her tree farm that was her project for this year. She had to grow trees and then sell them. It was cool seeing all the trees she had grown. She told me that was the easy part. The hard part was getting people to buy them. If a person would buy one, that tree would be planted in southern Costa Rica. After the tree farm, I went to dinner at the cafeteria and ate with my friends. After I chilled with Tonio for a bit, and then went to the game room. There I saw that the movie Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift was playing and decided to watch it. There I met another person named Anjelo, and he invited me to watch the newest Fast and the Furious movie the following night. I told him yes and then I went home and went to bed.