Biohuertos y Autoestima

At "la universidad agraria de la molina" leveling dirt with a rake. Because I'm just that cool.


We went to Lima again on Saturday. The first part of every organic gardening class at the agrarian university where we go is a lecture / power point and the last two classes have been about every vegetable that is remotely important in Peru. If that sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. However, we have an amazing professor who speaks clearly and somehow makes it very interesting. I’ve picked some info. to share with everyone, so I hope you all find this as cool as I do… or maybe slightly interesting at least: Espinaca (spinach): apart from it’s numerous nutritious qualities, you actually have to be careful with this vegetable because if the fertilizer has too much nitrogen in it, then it will get sucked into the plant leaves and can actually cause harm in children. Also, it is better to harvest spinach when it is still small (hence, “baby spinach”) and has less nutritional value as it grows larger. Betarraga (beets): if you buy beets, be sure to eat the leaves too! They have a much higher nutritional content than the beet itself. Paico (Mexican tea): very popular herb to put in soups, can expel intestinal parasites in humans and animals. Anyway, fun stuff, I think so anyway.
Then we headed out into the field and prepared a compost pile! And now I’m going to tell you about it. Ok, first you have to have either pipes with holes drilled in the sides or bamboo poles that will stick out of the pile and go down to the bottom. Then you place a layer of straw (or some other dry organic material), then a layer of vegetable trimmings or weeds (we used weeds and went out to the lettuce patch to dig up rotting lettuce), then a layer of estiercol (manure, dried – and I know how to say manure in Spanish! Hehe), then a layer of straw, a layer of vegetable scraps, a layer of manure, and a top layer of straw that covers everything. Then you water the whole thing with lots of water. The pipes / bamboo poles allow air to circulate through the entire compost pile, the process of decomposition in this setting is aerobic so we need to make sure that there is plenty of oxygen reaching all parts of the pile. The pile will actually heat up to 75-80 degrees Celsius and then start to drop, this is when you turn the pile over to redistribute the bacteria and organic matter. The whole process takes about three months and then you have nutrient rich compost in which to grow your garden. Yay! Wasn’t that fun? Now you can all go have fun gardens and tell me about them.

Ok, after lunch we went to a neighborhood called “Paloma Alta” which is a pueblo joven on the outskirts of Lima. What happens in a pueblo joven is that people move in on unclaimed land, squatters, if you will, and live in shacks built with woven straw walls, basically. After a settlement has been formed and people have lived there for ten years, the state will install electricity and after a while more (near my health post, the community has to pool their money together and pay for this themselves) running water will get put in. Right now if someone pays for it, a water truck will come by and fill your barrel in the morning with water, no money, no water for you. And even when there is running water, it isn’t drinkable until you boil it or purify / sterilize it using a different method. So this is a very poor and very large community. An organization that a Peace Corps volunteer is working with is helping to train health promoters in this community in the hope that this will promote basic health principals in this community and cut down on bacterial and viral diseases that occur especially at this level of poverty. Our role in the day was to participate and talk with the health promoters during some team building activities. Mostly this was to build the health promoters in training’s self-esteem and validate their efforts by being there and being impressed, hopefully inspiring them to share their knowledge with the community. I talked with one woman who’s name was Mairleni and who was a delight to talk to. There were many of them who were excited and enthusiastic it was a really positive experience for me and everyone I talked to. We even did an egg drop, in which we had to build a contraption for an egg that was dropped off a high wall and we couldn’t let the egg break. I thought this was interesting because I did the same project in 8th grade but I had about two weeks to figure it out. Here our group had five minutes, with three volunteers and five Peruvians, in Spanish, vastly different perspectives, and the egg didn’t break. Kind of made those two weeks in middle school seem a little useless. :)
We got home late but continued to go out (Sunday is the only day we get to sleep in so my friends and I wanted to take advantage of our one going out night while we could!) We went out to dinner and then meandered around Chosica a bit before going to Aquicito, a club that is very safe, just so you know. And then we all came back in a big group and in a very safe manner. :)