Something we are all strangely resigned to, living in Honduras, is early mornings. We leave the house at 8am so waking up at 6.30am is the norm (although some of us have taken longer to give in to this). Today, however, we are woken an hour earlier by next door’s cow. Sensing we are not going to get that extra hour of sleep, we are up and getting ready for a busy day. As I make my way to the pila to get a bit of washing done (little and often is the only way so as not to go insane/break your arms!), Ceri is already up doing her daily yoga, looking out over Puca. After breakfast, we all put on our walking boots, grab our backpacks - and of course the first aid kit – and sit by the gate waiting for Don Beto, our much-loved driver.
We board the rickety old bus and depart to pick up our first national volunteer… from the shop up the road. Naturally, Merlyn hops in with his snacks and a cheeky wink and we set off. The journey is, politely speaking, a little bumpy. The windows are at stomach height and so to view the stunning scenery a craned neck is compulsory and I think we all appreciate the (mostly) flat highway more than we ever expected…
We arrive in La Azomada, all our national volunteers now safely on board, get out and meet Vismar, our esteemed Red COMAL facilitator. The team is split, and my half head to Rancho Grande and Don Antonio’s farm. Here, after the mandatory coffee, we get to work creating micro organismos de la montaña activados, a fertilizer made with materials from the mountains. Although I’m sure it is much more complicated, to me making this fertilizer strongly resembled making a cup of tea… After measuring out the correct amount of water and adding the miel (heated sugar and water), we weighed out the micro organisms into a large bag, earlier sewn by Don Antonio’s daughter, which I proceed to tie up and dunk in the solution, just like a tea bag! This is all punctuated by cries of ‘foto! foto! foto!’ by Don Antonio everytime he spotted a photo opportunity, which was a great deal!
Half way through this procedure a campesino from El Zapote turns up, pen and notepad at the ready, to learn how to create the fertilizers. It transpired that he had heard about our work on our weekly radio show, where we had advertised where we would be on which days and invited people to come along - a definate boost for the whole team, knowing we were truly reaching people!
Once the micro organimos de la montaña activados were made, we head off to the finca de café to prune the coffee plants in order to allow more sunshine in. Us UK volunteers are slightly perplexed as to which branches we can and can’t cut, as the farmers and nationals chopped away, but with instruction – aka constant pointing paired with ‘este’ meaning ‘this one’– we are able to avoid destroying the crops with the machete.
Soon it is time for lunch, so we head back to La Azomada and meet the others. We sit in the sun with our baleadas (a traditional Honduran dish consisting of a flour tortilla, folded in half and filled with mashed fried beans and often other ingredients such as egg and avocado) and watch the unique array of different animals that are commonplace in Honduras, like processions of turkey chicks squeaking away!
The day still not over, we congregate in the salon to have a learning session and meeting. The learning session today is from us to the national volunteers, all about the UK and our hometowns. We each have a little speech prepared and through lots of actions and occasional help from our Spanish speakers we manage to hopefully convey a little of our lives back home to these people who have welcomed us so warmly into theirs. The session takes an unexpected turn as the nationals ask us about traditional British dancing, in answer to which Ceri and Richard attempt to foxtrot, much to everyone’s amusement.
Today ends in a meeting; we plan two more workshops on climate change and organic fertilizers, and discuss topics and ideas for our radio show. As we get back onto the bus, Don Beto hands out fresh oranges from the tree that we tuck into, tired but content after a productive and enjoyable day.
