The days are starting to take on a nice routine. Feed the pigs. Harvest the vegetables and fruit. Bring the vegetables up to the lodge. Spray the natural pesticides. Etc. However as per usual, some elements of hilarity ensued. The first began with Pablo relinquishing the responsibility of the harvest to me. As per usual I managed to get most of it correct, except for one glowing error. Sara and I embarked to find limes from the producing trees. Except Pablo never properly explained what exactly he was looking for.
We found the first two trees I had visited the last harvest with little problem. However without a real notion of what to collect, we ended up with only a few limes. Then we spent about 30 minutes trying to find the other trees in a large area. We sort of wandered through the thicket with little success (although we found other trees they had no fruits on them).
In the end I had to return and ask Pablo to help. Instead he took me back to the exact same trees and looked at us like we were idiots. This is because all the limes on the trees were ready for harvest. I also spent a good portion of time pre-Pablo trying to replicate the hook stick needed to harvest the limes and avoid getting hit by the thorns on the tree. This instrument is absolutely critical to successful lime harvesting.
After the lime debacle, Sara and I were talking to Pablo about bringing up the harvest. It took us about five minutes to understand that he wanted us to take up his wife’s lunch. Finally between Sara and I’s Spanish we figured it out and we headed off with Yolanda’s lunch and also the request to ask the kitchen staff for a big pot to cook food for the pigs. However we needed him to repeat it several times before we had more or less committed it to memory. He looked on dubiously as we walked off mispronouncing the word. I definitely believe he doubted our ability to gain the new pot.
Sara and I embarked up the hill to the lodge with our collection of produce and finally made introductions with the kitchen staff. They were nice enough again to supply us with lemonade to quench our thirst. We asked, correctly, for the big pot but the kitchen staff explained that they only had one and they needed it. It was time to collect the big jeffe (boss) and get him to explain why exactly we volunteers needed a giant pot. In the mean time we supplied Yolanda with her lunch and had a brief chat with the kitchen ladies as well.
The only other thing to note was the random conversation I had with Pablo’s wife. I was asking her about how long she was married to Pablo, which she said 18 years. Then she was explaining something about how Pablo had another woman before, however we only interpreted this after. At the time I was incredibly confused why she was telling us about his other woman, when I realized it must be before. I was trying to explain this in Spanish, when Sara (who was doing dishes) asked me if we were talking about pancakes. This pretty much made me lose my train of though and start laughing. To which Yolanda looked surprised. Then I had to explain in Spanish what had just happened. Apparently “antes” and “panqueques” sound similar, and Yolanda didn’t quite get what was so funny.
Lastly Sara and I were led to believe that Fridays are Pizza night. In preparation Sara had prepared some pizza dough using the flour we had and also the random bag of “active yeast”. With the dough ready to go, Martijn arrived but was communicating with us while talking on the phone. There was a miscommunication and we ended up heading up to the lodge and forgot about our grand plans for the pizza dough. And by the time we returned to our house it was far too late to use our earthen oven to cook the pizza. So tomorrow we have some experimentation to do!
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