Water, Soil & Seeds
Great news, the center just got a $500 US grant to replace the water pump and tank so that we can facilitate bathing and washing, and irrigation of the organic garden we are planning. It will sure be great to have water. It’s very hard to do laundry for 40 kids with only a slow trickling faucet to fill laundry tubs. It’s all washed by hand, if you can imagine, takes all day.
We really need to produce some vegetables. The kids’ diet of donated rice and noodles icky dried fish they eat just drives me crazy. The package noodles are sky-high in sodium and preservatives, yech! There are some mango trees but the kids scour them and eat the fruit before it’s even ripe.
I will probably spend most of my time just conditioning the soil and getting ready to plant. The soil here near the Linguyen Gulf is just sand and volcanic rock, so it’s very costly to try to build the soil. We are saving compost, but it’s hard since so little is thrown out. Many people live on rice & dry fish with no waste. This place is like busting rocks hard labor to do even the simplest things.
The people at Enca farm told me that many of plants the crops here are genetically modified so that they will not reproduce from seed! So I brought back papaya seed from good plants at Enca. I also have tomato, eggplant and beans that I got in Manila at a seed bank.
I never imagined the difficulties of doing even the simplest activities.
