Wow...PC training is Intensiana Jones

Our Protected Areas Management field based training is in full swing. In between giving presentations, visiting farms, planting trees, and going for hikes, I've been trying to study Spanish. I'm ashamed to admit I now have a favorite telenovela. It's called Soy Tu Duena (I'm your owner)...A girl sings "Soy tu duena," and then a whip cracks across the screen. Hahaha.

Anyhows, the highlight from my past two weeks:

I rode up to the mountains last weekend with the family of another PCT here. Her family had a coffee farm in the mountains up above our town. We rode up the mountain in their old pickup, which was shedding bits of the frame all the way up. The largest chunk of metal we pulled off was about the size of a futbol :) We finally made it up to their farm, which was an undefined patch of land that ran all the way up the the top of one mountain. Most coffee farmers live in the mountains so they can take care of the land, but since this family lives so far away, most of the coffee bushes were being shaded out by grass. We chopped down some of the grass, machete style, and then hacked down some ripe bananas to take home. When we made it back to the truck, which was parked at the closest campesinos house, the front tire was flat. The campesino family made us some delicious hand picked, hand roasted coffee while we changed the tire. Two of the guys living there started playing some ranchero music on little guitars. I tried to dance to it but everyone laughed at me. On our way back down the mountain, a huge storm broke right over us. We were instantly soaked. The road turned into a river. I was afraid we were going to slide off the mountain, but the truck did fine. The second we got ahead of the storm, the family decided it was a good idea to hop out of the truck and collect all the firewood we could find in the adjacent field. The field had just been burned, so all my clothes got covered with charcoal. At the bottom of the field was a pile of wood, neatly stacked, and probably waiting for the owner to come back and get it. But the family decided that was the easiest wood to get to, so they took some of that too. At this time the storm had caught up to us, so we hopped back in the truck and made it back to town right at the time it really started to rain (sideways).  All in all, a day well spent :)

That's all I've got time to recount right now.

Cheers!

Ruth