One day up in the villages with AFOPADI, I made the trip with several of the agricultural facilitators to check-in on a nursery being created up at about 8,000 or 9000 feet high. We arrived to find a group of women and their kids (check out babies on backs) filling plastic sacks with compost. The next step was to transplant the small seedlings into the sacks. Luckily, our timing was good. One of the facilitators demonstrated how the filled sacks lacked enough structural medium to keep the seedlings upright. He showed how you could simply add some of the surrounding mountain soil to strengthen the seedling mix.
Better to learn sooner than later, but I would have been bummed because all the bags needed to be emptied and then earth needed to be collected and sifted and then added to the compost. I could not believe the women. Immediately, half with kids slung across their backs, they leapt up and began to hoe. All the while smiling and joking and sharing their task. Incredible.
This community on this side of the mountain was new to me. Not only did it have sun, but it also had water!!! There is a nearby spring which meant that they were actually irrigating some corn. The soil up here is rich and people have enough of it generally. The problem is that usually the dry season lasts from November through April. But up in this community, it's a different story. One with possibilities...
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