Post-a Rica: Trip in Review (The White City)

Liberia was the closest city to the Earth campus. It is also known as the White City because the ground on which it is built is all volcanic tuff (or limestone, depending on whom I asked). In Liberia's less developed days, most of this white rocky dirt was exposed, and when the wind blew, everything got coated in a fine white dust. There are some areas outside of Liberia where this ground is still visible.

On one of our days at Earth, we took a trip to one of the communities students were working with, a squatter's village on the outskirts of Liberia. It was surreal to drive through the paved streets of the city, turn a corner in a residential area, and suddenly be in a dusty, blindingly white landscape.

We spent the morning helping out with an Earth project, building a garden for the community. The people mostly make their living from scavenging the nearby dump for sell-able goods. The hope was that they could begin to grow greens and vegetables for sale as well.

There were only a few sources of water in the area--7 hose spigots scattered throughout the neighborhood--so we started off the work by filling the water barrel of the man who lived in the house in front of the garden. First we filled a carload of plastic jugs, then brought the jugs up to the house. Like many of the materials the man used, the jugs were scavenged from the dump. Below is a picture of Jacob filling the barrel with one of the jugs. After we were done filling the barrel, one of the students pointed out that the writing on the jug says (in Spanish): Danger, Toxic, Floor Cleaner. She said that it's pretty common, that scavenging from the dump often means reusing jugs that used to hold nasty chemicals or collecting leaking batteries.

Part of the hope with the project was that the garden would provide a safer and more reliable way for people to sustain themselves. Below is a picture of the growing beds that we helped setup. The beds had to be level to keep the water from just pooling on one side. At first we were just doing it by eye, but then Patricia broke out the iPhone level.

Below is one of the coolest versions of the Topsy Turvy I have ever seen. They would cut the legs off of jeans, stuff the legs with dirt, hang the resulting sausage off of a nearby tree, then plant tomatoes in holes cut into the denim.

What was left over after all these jean planters were made? The largest collection of Jorts I have ever seen.

Post-a Rica: Trip in Review (TREES!)

I like trees....a lot. So I tend to take pictures of them when I travel. There were some pretty interesting things going on with the Costa Rican trees and woodworking. For example, a lot of the trees had trunks that were made up of a mass of intertwined mini-trunks. On the left I have an example of this, and on the right are columns from the Earth campus. You can see how these intertwined trunks translate into some pretty dynamic columns.

Another cool tree was the Naked Indian (below). The green trunk contains chlorophyll and just like a leaf, goes through photosynthesis....photosynthetic bark! It's kind of like the original version of using solar panels as siding for a house.

The Naked Indian is  commonly used by farmers as a living fence post:

On the woodworking front, I was particularly taken by some of the wooden beams on the Earth campus (below). They had this cool waving scallop shaped cuts:

I'm guessing they were made with an adz (below), which makes me wonder if they used a saw at all, or if the beams were shaped entirely with an adz, literally hacking the rectangular beam out of the log.

Trees also means fruit, and Mango trees (below) were a pretty common sight. It was cool to see the Earth students continually plucking mangoes and cashew fruits from the trees as they worked.

Below is a picture of the cashew fruit and nut. Eating the fruit is an interesting experience...the texture is a little bit like eating wet, gooey cotton balls. The taste is one part sweet, one part squash, with a tiny bit rotten thrown in to the mix. As you can see, the cashew nut hangs in a shell below the fruit. The shell is filled with a sap with the same compound that makes poison ivy give you a rash, so I didn't venture in to find the nut. Apparently you can roast the shell to get the nut out, but that can make the nasty compound go air born, so I decided to leave the de-shelling to the professionals. The director at Earth told us a story about how a cashew farmer noticed that all the plants would always die around the area where he piled his cashew shells. They are now looking into cashew shells as a natural herbicide.

Last on the tour of trees is the Tamarind. We spotted these as we were getting a tour of the mango orchards and rice fields (below). They were being used as a wind break around a rice field. Tamarind trees have a long brown seed pod with a sticky brown paste covering the seeds inside (below below). The paste is a popular ingredient in a lot of tropical cooking--it's what produces the tart flavor in Pad Thai. It's also used for a lot of sweet and sour candies throughout Latin America. I'm a big fan of the paste straight from the pod.