Where In The World are Brian And Angela?!?: Novedades (what´s new)

We are currently being rewarded with a very prosperous harvest of corn, squash, beans, oranges, and peanuts to make up for the very poor mango-tropical fruit harvests of Jan and Feb. Which means lots of tamales (yummy! sorry you have to miss all the fresh tamales, Dad!), corn tea (yup - they toast and grind the kernals and make a thick kind of tea from it, it´s good), corn puree, corn soup, fresh squeezed orange juice, squash soup and beans in almost everything. The time ´o plenty is here and oh so good. I will NEVER buy ornage juice from a box ever again. For that matter, never will I have the opportunity to walk on a dirt path through nature on a daily basis as part of my job, or live in a place without a single car or traffic sign. Isolation can be spiritually prosperous if you look at it right.

So, some pics of late:

Brian and I did a veggie cooking class for the moms that want to do gardens with us. We made three types: cooked carrots with sugar and cinnamon, cooked beets with mayo and cumin, and a raw salad with a ginger-garlic-green onion-soy sauce dressing. They actually really liked them, but the little ones wouldn´t eat raw spinach (I guess you can´t blame them).

Makin´salad.

This is one week´s worth of recyclables collected from about half of the community (we started with half of the population, about 40 families, and added on the next week to include everyone).

One of the trash workers has a full day to separate and crush they recyclables so we can bag them and sell them in Piura.

A community member with her bucket for recyclable classification. She and her husband are going the extra mile - they´re actually cleaning up the trash from their field and turning it in to us!! They´re really excited to be ¨getting rid of the contamination¨ so that their plants are healthier. So proud!

One of the two trash collectors with the recyclables. She can collect everything from her assigned sector within two hours, it´s didn´t turn out to be much extra work for her - which is good because it´s been easy to get her on board with the changes. The municipality is promising to buy a tricycle with a large bin attatched to make the work easier for the collectors. We shall see...

Some families had recyclables saved up for months and months.

The participation so far is 100%, people love having their trash collected. If one of the collectors forgets to go to a house, we hear about it within hours.