The world has a way of said, “bringing you back down to earth”. When life starts to get too easy for too long of a period of time, you know something is coming along quite soon to shake things up a bit and keep our existence in this universe interesting.
We had made tarp structures out of bamboo and tarp when we first arrived out in the valley because the larger blue tents couldn’t quite handle the jungle environment. Apparently our tents and the tarps we used has this in common because getting back into the valley, this is what we came across (above). Our tarps had been torn to shreds from the looks of it by some evil, tarp loathing, Panamanian dragon. It actually was not a dragon, but just some jungle wind and right at that moment, Captain Hindsight showed up to save the day. Yes, looking back it was kinda stupid thinking we could leave our tarps up thinking it would just be alright, especially because that’s the exact reason we take down and pack up our tents every time we leave the valley. Now, when we had the tarps up over our tents, the floor of our tents would pool up and we would have to very strategically place our stuff in dry land. With out the tarps, though, nothing was safe. Every part of our tent was covered in water. This gave me a good laugh for many days. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen until about 4 days into our stent. Yes, I said unfortunately.
Something worse than just tent issues was occurring in the valley when we got back. It had not rained in 6 days by the time we arrived. Back home, 6 days was nothing. Meh, happens all the time. This, though, was a whole different story. This is the tropical rain forest in the rainy season so right now it should be raining each and every day consistently pretty hard. This of course was not an issue to most of the people in the camp because they were pretty happy their stuff got to stay dry. For the Agriculture team though, this was disaster. Just looking around one could see the ground filled with cracks, and the once plethora of bright greens wilting to brown. Our plants were in dire danger.
Fortunately though, Mother Nature didn’t know who she was dealing with. I’m Jordan Krock, one of the Kalu Yala Agriculture Team armed with knowledge, shovels, and 5 gallon plastic barrels!! HAHA I laugh at your feeble attempts to halt our progress. To counter, we hiked the plastic barrels to and from the river to water all of our plants (is not as easy as it sounds). We still had work to do as well. Going on the offensive, we had 8 trees, and over 30 other plants to go in.
(Two brown coconut trees and a green coconut tree) (from left to right)
(Two Lemon Grass plants, A Cinnamon tree, one of 3 Amarillo trees)
Around the magic circle we planted about 6 Sugar cane Plants along with along the fence line we planted about 13 more Sugar Canes.
Around the magic circle we planted about 7 Yucca plants. Yucca is very similar to the Potato except for a few things. The roots (the part you eat) look just barely different. The above ground part of the Yucca though grows up long like a small tree. Along the fence line we also planted 10 more Yucca plants.
We accomplished a lot out there this past stent and we got really affiliated with the jungle. Once again, I can’t wait to get back out there to make even more progress than before!