Market Day

Every Sunday there is a farmer's market in San Rafael - the town at the bottom of the mountain. So much fun and so much fruit! Would you like 20 oranges? Well, that'll be $3 please. A coconut with a straw to drink the milk? 60 cents. How about a carrot as big as your forearm? Or a zillion green mangoes? Or fresh honey in a recycled whiskey bottle? Yeah, you can find all of that.

Overview of the market.

I love oranges. All the oranges. Every day.

Fresh pupusas. 

It's bigger than my hands. And mouth. And head.

Pictures courtesy of Meghan :-)

Missions

There are Christians that spend much of their lives shouting, "Yes Lord, send me!"

Yeah, I'm not one of those.

Throughout my life, I've repeatedly asked God to tell me to do anything but a) become a missionary and b) go serve in Africa. Welp, it looks like my group is headed on our missions outreach to Kenya and/or Malawi. We will be deciding for certain next week. More details to come!

With my luck, I'll spend most of the time preaching.

Gifts

Christians love to talk about how each of us have gifts given by God, both spiritual gifts and skills that was use in our everyday lives. I've always thought my life would be defined by finding these gifts and then finding a suitable way to apply them.

Funny thing is, I don't actually like many of my practical gifts. Sure, I can do math, but I don't enjoy it. Yeah, I can write a research paper, but why would I spend my life on theoretical knowledge?

I do enjoy writing, music, relationships, building, etc. The list goes on. Naturally, I have little talent for any of these things.

One of the ideas that I'm learning through YWAM is that you can, to some extent, pick your own talents. The human mind is one of God's greatest gifts and I get to choose how to use it, which tends to result in a great number of failures. Life is failure, however, and then standing up again. So if I want to learn to garden, then I can try, and probably kill a great many plants (sorry in advance). If my heart's deepest desire turns out to be raising goats, well, there might be lots of temporarily unhappy goats in my future. If I love to pass my knowledge along to others, there will certainly be many confused students wandering around at first.

Finding that one natural gift might not be my best option. After all, think of all the adventures I would have missed while hiding in a library. Then again, there may be many adventures left for me in libraries, who knows?

Lizard!

Everyone needs more lizards in their lives.

Double-Digging and Zai Holes

Every week we have two workshops teaching us the practical part of sustainable development. In this case, double-digging and zai holes. Sounds thrilling, eh? Actually, these techniques are pretty cool because they help rejuvenate tired soil as well as increasing crop yields. This is wonderful for farmers with very little land or who have been growing cash crops without resting their soil. Great stuff. Very easy and effective - really the main idea is to add compost for nutrients and then learn how to apply the compost correctly.

Learning how to double dig an existing raised bed. Basically you loosen the soil and add compost. 

Digging a Zai Hole - 2' by 2' by 2'. We filled it in with layers with fresh manure, compost, dirt, and dry materials. This nutrient rich and light soil can increase yields by 3-4 times the normal compost and dirt in the double-dug beds. It's a bit more work, but it wonderful for wakening up tired land.

Plants! We put some baby zucchini in our hole. Hopefully they will do well. I like zucchini. 

Visitors

Last week my class headed out to one of the poorest communities in San Jose. Most of the people living there are are Nicaraguans, probably illegal immigrants. Our teachers are part of a ministry called Homes of Hope which has built a number of houses in this community and they wanted to show us the difference it can make in a family's life.

We weren't there to do ministry, just as visitors to understand the meaning of extreme poverty. I'm not particularly proud of our excursion, since I don't think any community should be used as show and tell. However, our teachers seemed very at home with the people we visited and everyone was very welcoming. If the same thing had happened to me, I don't think I would have been nearly as forgiving. 

That being said, it was amazing to see the difference a single house can make in this community. Just look at the differences between a Homes of Hope house and it's neighbor.

The yellow house on the left was built by Homes of Hope. They didn't paint it bright yellow, the family did that themselves. Our teachers thought the colour choice was pretty funny.

Right next to the train tracks.

The entire neighborhood looks like this - it was pretty intimidating.