Today we were off to el vivero -- plant nursery -- to buy some plants for the school. We hired Fonso -- a cousin of Tanya's who happens to own a gua gua (a small bus)-- to pick us up at the camp at 9:30. So, at 10:15 Fonso came to pick us up. Four of our students didn't show up and we don't know why. Perhaps their parents didn't want their children to go on this "field trip". Carlos, our super "energetic" 10 year old camper, told us that he got lost on two school field trips and his teacher couldn't find him. Apparently the school takes huge groups of kids on field trips and not all the kids are necessarily accounted for when they get back. Don't get me wrong, all the kids end up getting home eventually. I'm not really sure how though.
In any event, our intimate group of 10 headed off to learn about plants. When we arrived at the nursery, the owner showed us around and explained how they used seedlings of one plant to create many plants -- a splicing technique that I didn't hear because I was busy taking pictures. We saw lots of fruit tree saplings -- avocado, carambola(star fruit), lemon, sweet orange and regular orange. I later learned that sweet oranges are for eating and regular oranges are used to make juice. (And they're not really called "regular" oranges. Those ones just don't have a descriptor like "sweet" so I call them regular. At first I was going to call them "non-sweet" but that didn't seem to make sense as they are still quite sweet.)
But I digress. We also looked at lots of different flowers and bought four to bring back to the school (Tio Tomas, Tanya's uncle who works for the department of agriculuture, is hopefully going to bring us some more to plant next week.) And tomorrow we're going to plant them. If we can find a shovel, that is...
-josh
For more photos goto:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanyaparis/?saved=1
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