Wed 18 Nov

Today I helped Omar with emptying old plastic bags old dirt that had been used for trees in the past. We dumped the dirt into a wheel barrel and then take it to the dirt pile. The only hard part was it was down poring and that made the mud on the ground extremely slippery so Omar and I had a lot of difficulty getting the dirt from point A to point B without falling. After finishing that project, my friend named Fee came to the vivero to chill and help out. Orlando started playing Cumbia music from his car and we all started dancing. It was so much fun and I learned a couple new moves from Fee. Once we got tired of dancing, Fee and I planted papaya seeds into about 250 dirt bags. When we finished, Richard the professor came to the vivero and gave me a short lesson on the papaya fruit and how to tell the difference from a female plant and a male/female plant. The male/female has the long and skinny flower bud, while the female has the round circular flower bud. He also explained that when planting the papaya seed, you need to plant about 4 or 5 in each bag. This will increase the chance of getting a plant with flowers which means it will grow fruit. Hopefully there will be two plants with flowers and then you will take those two and plant them next to each other in pairs. Once both of the plants grow a little bit bigger, you can tell the difference of the flower and by having that knowledge, choose which one you want to keep. Last he told me about dirt and how it can be dangerous to your plants. If you get dirt from a papaya farm and bring it to a new place to plant more papaya, you are increasing the chance that your plants with obtain some sort of virus or disease. Ways to avoid that is to either get dirt from another place were other plants are growing and not the one your about to plant, your good. Also you can heat up your dirt to really high temperatures to kill all the bacteria in the dirt and maybe viruses. If the dirt has too much clay in it, you need to use sand or rice shells to make the dirt more breathable and able to let water pass through it. After my lesson, Omar taught me how to prune some more citrus trees and then that’s what I finished up with. Later, I chilled at the house, went to dinner and then went to Yoga. After yoga a bunch of the Pasante went to Mary's house to throw a goodbye party for Tanner because he is going to leave Friday. During the party the conversation switched to the sheep at EARTH. I found out through the other Pasante that no one was taking care of them and all they had to eat was grass. Also that one of the pasante saw that the baby lambs were dying from not getting milk from their mother's because almost all of the sheep were sick. So one pasante named Tie went around EARTH to ask for help but no one did. She finally got medicine that doesn’t work that well to help the sheep from loosing their hair. But Tie has been trying to fight this to get help from EARTH to hire someone to take care of the sheep, or if EARTH can't do that, then get rid of the sheep. After hearing these sad stories, I was motivated to help Tie and the other students who are trying to get help for the sheep. Now we are going to talk to EARTH to see we have to talk to about getting funds for medicine and a care taker for these poor sheep. After that party I went home and went to bed.